Who shouldn't get vaccinated? The informed part of informed consent.

 Ten months after the vaccines became available, we now have meaningful data that can guide people deciding if they should or shouldn't get themselves or their children vaccinated against covid.

The best available data about the actual risks of the mRNA vaccines--specifically the Pfizer/BioNTech shots--come from a joint Israeli-Harvard Medical School study evaluating the medical records of more than 1.6 million people, half of whom received two Pfizer jabs while half remained unvaccinated. I reported on this study here, and you can find the peer-reviewed paper itself, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, here.

Of course. But what are the actual risks and benefits?

Credit: Nick Youngson

The study found that just five side-effects occurred more frequently in the vaccinated groups in the six weeks following vaccination relative to a comparable time period for the unvaccinated group. These included swollen lymph nodes (78.4 additional cases per 100,000 people), shingles (15.8 extra cases per 100,000), appendicitis (5 additional cases per 100,000), Bell's palsy (3.5 additional cases per 100,000) and myocarditis (2.7 additional cases per 100,000, almost all in young men).

If we add all those side-effects together we find an incidence of 105.4 per 100,000 fully vaccinated people.

It's worth noting that those symptoms vary in seriousness. The most frequent--swollen lymph nodes--is a predictable, rarely serious, reaction to vaccination, while the remaining four potentially more serious conditions represent a total of just 27 additional cases per 100,000 vaccinated people.

To keep things simple and clear, you can safely estimate that if you get two rounds of the Pfizer vaccine, your risk of suffering any reaction worse than a sore arm is around 1 in 1000, and your risk of a serious side-effect such as shingles or appendicitis is around 1 out of 3700.

We can compare these risks to the risks from covid itself in a variety of ways. Here are several that readers may find helpful:

Risks from covid in the Israeli-Harvard study: Among the 800,000 participants who remained unvaccinated, a significant number contracted covid. As is typical of covid, not all of those developed serious symptoms. However, far more did experience significant symptoms and sequelae from covid than were seen in their vaccinated peers. These included cardiac arrythmia (166 extra cases per 100,000), acute kidney injury (125.4 extra cases per 100,000), pulmonary embolism--a blood clot in the lung--(61.7 extra cases per 100,000), deep-vein thrombosis (43 extra cases per 100,000), myocardial infarction--a heart attack--(25 extra cases per 100,000), myocarditis (11 extra cases per 100,000), pericarditis (10.9 extra cases per 100,000) and intracranial bleeding (7.6 extra cases per 100,000).

So, in the same 6 week period, the unvaccinated group suffered serious, very serious or potentially fatal symptoms such as acute kidney injury, pulmonary blood clots or heart attacks at a combined rate of 443 per 100,000. That's more than four times the rate of all the vaccine side-effects combined, and 16 times the rate of the potentially serious vaccine side-effects.

Risk of contracting covid in the US as a whole. As of 10/18/21, there have been 45,798,599 recorded covid cases in the US. That's a case rate of 13,733 per 100,000 people, accumulated over 22 months. It's not possible to predict the exact course of the pandemic going forward, but for the average American the risk of contracting covid, say in the next 12 months, is probably 50 or 60 times higher than the risk of any side-effect from the vaccine, and several hundred times higher than the risk of any of the more serious side-effects.

As critics of covid vaccination point out, many covid cases are relatively mild. However, in the US over the course of the pandemic so far, about one out of every 20 people who contracted covid got sick enough to require hospitalization.

Risk of covid hospitalization in the US as a whole. As of 10/18/21, the cumulative covid hospitalization rate in the US reached 694 per 100,000. That implies that the average US resident is 6.6 times more likely to have been hospitalized because of covid than they would have been at risk for any negative reaction to the vaccine, and 26 times more likely to have been hospitalized from covid than to have risked a serious reaction to the vaccine.

Again, the first 22 months of the pandemic don't tell us what the next 22 months will bring, but the risk continues, especially among the unvaccinated.

Again, vaccination critics point out that "covid has a 99 percent survival rate." That's not quite true. In the US so far, 1.6 percent of recorded covid cases have resulted in recorded covid deaths. We can now compare that to the risks from vaccination.

Risk of death from covid in the US as a whole. As of 10/18/21 the cumulative rate of deaths from covid hit 224.5 per 100,000 people. That means that on average, a US resident is 2.1 times more likely to have died from covid since the start of the pandemic to date than to have risked any negative reaction to a vaccine, and 8.3 times more likely to have died as a result of covid than to have risked one of the serious reaction to the vaccine.

Risk of covid deaths state by state. As of 10/18/21, five states had cumulative covid death rates less than 105 deaths per 100,000 population. Those are Oregon (99), Utah (96), Hawaii (87), Alaska (59) and Vermont (55). For residents in those states, which comprise just three percent of the US population, the odds of having died from covid so far in the pandemic are somewhat less than the risk of having any negative reaction to the vaccine, but still two to three times higher than the risk of one of the serious vaccine side-effects. Even in those states, however, the risk of hospitalization from covid is significantly higher than any of the risks from the vaccine.

The remaining 97 percent of Americans live in states where the risks of contracting covid, becoming seriously ill, being hospitalized or dying from covid are greater than the risks of any negative sequelae from the vaccines.

Risk of covid deaths county by county. You can check your county's cumulative covid death rate on this map. If you're in one of the darker blue counties--most of which have very small populations--the cumulative death rate per 100,000 people is less than the risk of side-effects from the vaccine. Still, unless your county's cumulative death rate is less than 12 per 100,000, as it is in Orange County, Vermont (population 29,000) or Skamania County, Washington (population 11,066), your risk of hospitalization from covid is higher than any risk from the vaccine.

Risk of covid deaths from breakthrough infections: We now know that vaccine-induced immunity fades over time, and that the delta variant in particular is causing a significant number of fully vaccinated people to fall ill. However, the vaccines are still highly protective against severe illness and death. Perhaps the most striking statistic is that out of 187,000,000 fully vaccinated Americans, 7,178 have died from covid, or just 3.8 per 100,000. That's less than 6 percent of the 124,000 Americans who have died from covid since mid-July, when the delta variant became predominant.

In summary, for the large majority of Americans, the risks of getting covid, suffering one or more of the serious impacts of covid, having to be hospitalized because of covid, or dying from covid are all far higher than the risks of any side-effect of the mRNA vaccines, and, even against the delta variant, the vaccines remain highly protective against severe illness or death.

What about children?

There is one group, however, for whom this may not be true. As many critics of covid vaccination have pointed out, the risks from covid are significantly lower for young people. For example, the cumulative covid death rate for children under 15 is less than 5 per 100,000, comparable to the death rate for fully vaccinated adults. For 16 and 17 year-olds it's 9 per 100,000, and from 18 through 29, 16 per 100,000. If we were just comparing the risk of dying from covid to the much less serious but documented risks from the mRNA vaccines, one could potentially come down on the side of not vaccinating young children and teenagers.

The picture changes if we include the risk of children needing to be hospitalized because of covid. The cumulative covid hospitalization rate for children 0 through 4 is 87 per 100,000, and from 5 through 18, 51.8 per 100,000. These are less than the risk of any side effects of the vaccines, but higher than the risks of serious side effects. Luckily, young children are less likely to be severely sickened or to die from covid than adults, but a significant number do need to be hospitalized.

Safety and efficacy trials of covid vaccines for children from 5 through 11 are currently taking place, and the White House has announced plans to promote vaccination of children ages 5 through 11 once a children's vaccine is approved. We should have more data specific to that age group within the next few months.

Individual risks vs. social responsibility

The risk ratios discussed above refer to individual risks. That is, one could decide to be vaccinated or not based only on comparing one's own risk of contracting covid, or of requiring hospitalization, or of dying vs. the known risks from the vaccine. However, public health authorities point out that, much like choosing to wear a mask, getting vaccinated doesn't just protect the person getting the jab, it also protects others by reducing the likelihood that that person will infect others. This multiplicative factor becomes significant when large numbers of people in a population remain unvaccinated, and so provide a continuing medium for the virus.

Currently, 43 percent of the US population remain unvaccinated, or more than 143 million people. Around half of those are adults who would incur low risks from vaccination yet could protect themselves and others by doing so. As long as they choose not to get vaccinated, they remain a big, wide playing field across which the coronavirus can continue its advance.

KIDS URGENTLY NEED TO BE PROTECTED FROM COVID TOO

 If you have children or grandchildren, or if you just care about kids, please read this piece from the Washington Post:

Children with covid can get very ill, as I have seen in my hospital - The Washington Post 

It's still rare, but kids too can get severe cases of Covid

Credit: vperemen

The latest statistics show that children now account for 15 percent of new covid cases in the US. Since they can't yet be vaccinated, their protection must come from adult vaccination, facemasks, social distancing, testing and tracing--all the sensible public health measures that we're familiar with (and of course very tired of). But let's do it for the sake of the children.

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REA 8/11/21

THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST

Some events cry out for a Biblical context.

A tragic case in point:

A headline from November 9: Lawyers Can't Reunite 666 Seized Migrant Children With Parents . . .

New Testament, Book of Revelation, Chapter 13, Verse 18: Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.

Stephen Miller, architect of Trump's Zero Tolerance program

Credit: Southern Poverty Law Program

A lot of despicable things have happened in the past four years, but one of the most bestial was the heartless separation of children--many under the age of five, some of them infants--from their parents, a pogrom, excuse me, program reportedly pushed by Stephen Miller and implemented by Trump through much of 2017 and 2018. 

Not only were thousands of children and parents torn apart, in many cases this was done without even a paper trail that would allow them ever to be reunited. 

Hence these 666 children orphaned in our name by our government.

This may fit the definition of a crime against humanity. It certainly should earn its perpetrators a punishment of Biblical proportion.

REA

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12/3/20: To add to the cold-blooded malevolence of the separations themselves, it now appears that the Trump administration deliberately withheld crucial information that may let at least some of these families reunite. You can see the details here and here.

GUNS, YOUNG PEOPLE AND SUICIDE

Last year, nearly 40,000 people died in the U.S. from the use of firearms. Among those deaths, roughly 60 percent were suicides. And among those were more than 1000 young people between the ages of 10 and 19; nearly three children or teenagers every day.

As a quick internet search will show you, there's a lot of information available to parents, teachers and other concerned people about how to reduce the risk that a child will commit suicide. Unfortunately, many of these well-meaning and supposedly authoritative sources gloss over or fail even to mention the single biggest step to take to reduce the number of suicides by young people.

That step is--get guns out of their homes.

Young people and guns--a lethal combination

Credit: publicdomainpictures.net

New research from the Boston School of Public Health (BUSPH) shows that on a state-by-state basis, every ten percent increase in gun ownership increases the youth suicide rate by 27 percent. That means that young people in states like Alaska, with the highest rate of gun ownership, were five times more likely to kill themselves than young people in states like New Jersey with the lowest percentage of guns in homes.

The rate of gun ownership varies greatly from state to state. The 10 states with the highest rates averaged more than one gun for every two households (52.5%), while the 10 states with the lowest gun ownership averaged just one gun per every five households.

Remarkably, gun ownership outweighed every other factor--poverty, race, educational levels, family structure, mental illness, drug and alcohol use, you name it--contributing to youth suicide. "This study demonstrates that the strongest single predictor of a state's youth suicide rate is the prevalence of household gun ownership in that state," says Michael Siegel, a community health researcher at BUSPH and the study's co-author.

The bottom line is clear. If you want to reduce the number of children and teenagers who kill themselves, the first and most significant thing to do is to get guns out of their homes.

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You can find the full study here.

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Young people in the U.S. are far more at risk from gun-related violence of all kinds than youth in other countries. You can read a zerospinzone post about that here.

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GUNS AND KIDS IN THE US

We all know that guns are a hot-button issue here in the United States. The Constitution grants and the Supreme Court affirms Americans' right to bear arms, and we do that to a fault. According to the Independent, US citizens own 40 percent of all the privately owned arms in the world, more than the next 25 most heavily armed countries combined. That's a remarkable 12 guns for every 10 of us, men, woman and children.

Many of those 393 million guns don't just sit unloaded, securely stored and unavailable to children. While millions of responsible gun owners do keep their weapons safely away from children, millions do not. Here's one sad result whose magnitude shocked me: According to Stephanie Chao, a pediatric surgeon and professor of surgery at Stanford University, children aged 15-19 in the US are 82 times more likely to die from gun homicide than in any other developed country.

Nearly 3000 US children die from firearm injuries every year

Photo credit: Mediapart

Please excuse my emphasis here: American teenagers are not twice as likely to die from a deliberate gunshot, not 10 times more likely, not 50 times more likely, but 82 times more likely. Than in any other developed country.

The statistics for younger children, and for suicide and accidental deaths from guns are not quite so horrendous, but the US is a consistent and clear outlier on every measure relating to gun deaths.

As a pediatric surgeon dealing with trauma every day, Chao would very much like to find ways to reduce or prevent these tragic deaths. Here's a clue that she found. State by state, laws make a difference.

"Firearm-related injuries are the second leading cause of death among children in the United States," she says, "but we found a clear discrepancy in where those deaths happen that corresponds with the strength of states' firearm legislation. In states with lenient laws, children die at alarmingly greater rates."

How much difference can gun laws make? Chao and her colleagues found that in states with the most relaxed gun laws 5 children out of every 100,000 die from gun-related injuries every year. States with the strictest gun-control laws cut that death rate nearly in half, down to 2.6 children out of every 100,000.

Saving half of children at risk from gun-related death would be a very good thing. Saving all of them would be even better. "Each and every one of these deaths is preventable," says Chao. "Our study demonstrates that state-level legislation prevents children from dying from guns."

When it comes to our children, perhaps we can get away from slogans and fiery rhetoric, and work towards sensible gun-safety laws in more states. Three thousand US children don't need to die from gunshots next year.

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As I write this, the 2018 midterm elections are just a day away. If you would like to find out about gun-control legislation and pro-gun-control candidates in your state, here's an excellent resource. Your vote could save young lives.

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There's a strong relationship between gun ownership and youth suicide. You can read a zerospinzone post about that here.

  

HOW VALUABLE IS A SCHOOLYARD TREE?

A few schoolyard trees might make the difference between a child's future success or failure.

That's the remarkable implication of new research carried out by Ming Kuo, an environmental scientist at the University of Illinois and her colleagues. Using advanced imaging technology and innovative statistical analysis, Professor Kuo and her colleagues found that the amount of tree cover in and around schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods predicted the academic achievement of students, especially in mathematics. She cautions that the current study only shows a statistically robust correlation, not proof of cause and effect. Still, she  would like to see these findings widely applied as a relatively inexpensive intervention that could potentially benefit millions of disadvantaged children in the US.

"Early math skills are one of the best predictors of later success, not just in math, but in school in general," says Kuo. "So what we have here is a very exciting clue that maybe simply greening -- planting trees in school yards -- could potentially have a significant impact in math achievement and school success down the line for these kids. And you don't have to plaster the schoolyard with trees -- just bringing schools up to average looks like it could have a substantial effect."

 Treeless schoolyard, Washington, DC

Credit: chesbayprogram

Kuo and her colleagues found that tree cover in and around schools had a beneficial effect on children's academic success independently of the levels of disadvantage in their student bodies, the percentage of bilingual students, the number of students, the percentage of female students, and the pupil/teacher ratio. And the impact of trees was localized and specific--more tree cover in the catchment neighborhood did not have the same effect, nor did the amount of grass or shrubbery in the schoolyard.

Schoolyard with trees, Greenbelt, Maryland

Credit: Marjorie Collins/Library of Congress 

As most of us have learned, complicated problems usually require complicated solutions. Wouldn't it be great if Professor Kuo has alerted us to a simple intervention that could at least help solve the complex and extremely important problem of so-called "underachieving schools"?

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You can find the full research article here. 

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WHO NEEDS SCIENCE? CERTAINLY NOT TRUMP'S EPA.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was created in 1970 with the mandate to enforce national environmental protection standards, and to conduct research on pollution in order to strengthen environmental protection and guide policy-making.

 Andrew Wheeler

the smiling face of the new EPA

To coordinate these efforts, the EPA created the Office of Science Advisor. Here's how the EPA's website describes the Science Advisor's role as of 9/28/18:

The Science Advisor works across the Agency to ensure that the highest quality science is better integrated into the Agency's policies and decisions. In this capacity, the Science Advisor leads the OSA and chairs the Agency's Science and Technology Policy Council which reviews selected science issues that have implications across program and regional offices. The mission of the OSA is to provide leadership and serve as an honest broker for cross-Agency science, science policy, and technology issues.

But not for long. The EPA is planning to delete the Office of Science Advisor, ostensibly to "eliminate redundancies" and "combine offices with similar functions." The scientist who has filled the post since 1981, Dr. Jennifer Orme-Zavaleta, is an expert on the effects of chemicals and other risk factors on human and environmental health. Apparently, her expertise is no longer needed at the EPA.

Neither is that of Dr. Ruth Etzel, the head of the Office of Chilren's Health. Dr. Etzel, a specialist in children's diseases and a strong advocate for protecting children from pollutants, was placed on administrative leave, stripped of her ID, email and access to the building, and sent packing.

It's more evidence, if needed, that Trump's EPA, currently headed by Andrew Wheeler, a lawyer and former coal lobbyist, is not all that interested in the kind of inconvenient facts once provided by Drs. Etzel and Orme-Zavaleta. Protecting people and the environment has been pushed to the rear, while deregulating polluting industries has been ushered to the front. The new EPA can now freely focus on Trump's promise to advance the cause of "beautiful, clean coal."*

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* That beautiful clean coal produces lots of toxic waste, including neurotoxic mercury. Now the EPA is going to make it easier for polluters to put that into the air you and your children breathe, and the water you drink.

Not to mention radiation. If you believe that a little ionizing radiation is good for you, then today's EPA is the place for you, as they also work to justify reducing radiation protection rules.

And you can now include particulates and ozone; the advisory boards dealing with both of these pollutants are being gutted or disbanded.

You can read more about these anti-science and anti-citizen steps here.

This just in (11/4/18): The EPA's website will no longer discuss climate change. I guess that for Trump's EPA, climate has nothing to do with protecting the environment.

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TRUMP AND PRUITT'S EPA GUTS RESEARCH ON TOXIC CHEMICALS AND KIDS

I maintain a computer file with hundreds of scientific articles about the effects of toxic substances on children.

Arsenic and lead in drinking water. Pesticides and other Persistent Organic Pollutants in the air we breathe, clothing, furniture, building materials, you name it. Some common drugs taken during pregnancy. Hormones and endocrine disrupting chemicals in food, plastics, toys, just about anything that could go into a child's mouth. Chemicals used in fracking that get into the air and water. Fire retardants, fungicides, and many other classes of chemicals. Not to mention the impact of the cocktail of these chemicals that many people carry in their bodies, in breast milk, in their blood.

 Credit: DES Daughter

These articles detail the impacts of these toxins on developing children still in the womb, on infants, children, teenagers (and adults too). Autism, attention deficits, abnormal brain activity, birth defects, impaired sleep, impaired learning, reduced IQ, disruptions in the reproductive system, infertility, obesity, cancer, breathing problems, kidney and liver damage--all of these and many more impairments and diseases have been linked to various chemicals that find their way into our children's bodies.

Like research on smoking decades ago and on climate change now, much of this research is controversial or marginalized. The suspect chemicals have important uses in agriculture, energy production, medicine, and many other activities, and add billions of dollars to the economy and to the bottom lines of giant corporations. The companies that manufacture and sell these substances are strongly motivated to keep selling them, and are willing to spend huge sums to question, hide or suppress research that threatens their bottom line, carry out or fund research aimed at sowing doubt about such threatening findings; and in many cases demean or threaten researchers who are brave enough to research these links.

Still, this body of research has been used by governments around the world, and by the US, to develop legislation to ban some of the most deadly chemicals, reduce and control the use of many others, and protect the health of children and adults.

In the US, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been one of the major sources of funding for research on the impacts of known or potential toxins, through its National Center for Environmental Research (NCER). The NCER funded millions of dollars of research on the risks to children from potentially dangerous substances. Until now, that is.

Trump's appointee to head the EPA, Scott Pruitt, has decided to kill the NCER, as announced on February 26, 2018. The gutting of the program is couched as an efficiency measure, but is in line with Trump and Pruitt's goals of reducing regulations and risks for corporations, unfortunately at the expense of America's children.

In 1965, comedian Tom Lehrer satirized the extent of pollution that Americans were then being exposed to in the song "Pollution" on his album That Was the Year That Was. The song opens with:

If you visit American cith
You will find it very pretty
Just two things of which you must beware:
Don't drink the water and don't breath the air!

The EPA was created five years later, in December of 1970. Over the years, it did a lot to clean up America's polluted rivers, lakes, industrial sites, cities and skies. However, under Trump and Pruitt, we seem to be turning back the clock to those bad old days, when, as Lehrer concluded:

So go to the city, see the crazy people there
Like lambs to the slaughter
They're drinking the water
And breathing the air

A TALE OF TWO BULLIES

I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the two bullies who have bothered me the most were both named Donald T.

The first Donald T. was the biggest bully at my elementary school. (I'm not providing his full name in the hope that he's changed). Taller and beefier than most of the kids, he  seemed to enjoy creating fear and causing pain. In class, when the teacher's back was turned, he pulled girls' hair and punched other boys. At recess, he and his mini-gang liked to single someone out, chase him or her down, taunt, push and punch them, and then scatter before a teacher could intervene.

 A bully in action

Credit: http://bullyingproject.com/bullies-and-victims/

I remember reading comments by a naturalist who pointed out that when predatory animals are on the hunt they are not fearful or angry--they don't show any signs of negative emotions. Instead, they are alert, goal-oriented and aroused in a positive way; you might say they're at the top of their game.

Donald T. and his buddies were like that. Singling out the day's victim, the chase, circling their prey, and the pushing and pummeling were clearly fun for them. Especially if someone really panicked or started to cry, the gang's reaction was not shame or remorse, but gleeful laughter.***

My training and career were in psychology. I'm well aware of the characterological propensities, vulnerabilities and unfortunate developmental events that may turn a child into a bully. However, the existence of such contributing factors doesn't provide much comfort to a bully's victims. I'm also very aware--and wary--of what seems to be our natural human propensity to blame victims for what happens to them. So, on balance, I don't find it particularly helpful to empathize with bullies or try to excuse their behavior.

That brings us to Donald T. number two, the bully-in-chief of the United States.

 Trump and followers at a rally

Credit: Gage Skidmore

I never paid much attention to Trump until he emerged as a presidential candidate. But once I saw him in action, all of my bully-alarm-bells went off. Nothing he's said or done since then has changed that first impression (and a lot that he's said and done has deepened and strengthened my belief that he is a damaged, disturbed and dangerous individual).

I recently read an article from the Washington Post by social scientist Bella dePaulo, entitled "I study liars. I've never seen one like Donald Trump," that clarified why I find Trump so disturbing. DePaulo used the Post's Fact Checker feature to study the more than 1,600 lies or "misleading claims" that Trump emitted during his first 298 days in office--about six whoppers per day. The sheer number of lies he told was "remarkable," but, according to dePaulo, what really set Trump apart was the number of "cruel lies, told to hurt or disparage others."

Here's one example:

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

Vanity Fair, which looks like it is on its last legs, is bending over backwards in apologizing for the minor hit they took at Crooked H. Anna Wintour, who was all set to be Amb to Court of St James’s &; a big fundraiser for CH, is beside herself in grief &; begging for forgiveness!

7:24 AM - 28 Dec 2017

In one tweet, Trump manages to demean and disparage Vanity Fair (on its last legs and bending over backwards apologizing), Hillary Clinton (crooked), and Anna Wintour (beside herself with grief and begging for forgiveness).

Here's another:

Lightweight Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a total flunky for Chuck Schumer and someone who would come to my office “begging” for campaign contributions not so long ago (and would do anything for them), is now in the ring fighting against Trump. Very disloyal to Bill &; Crooked-USED!

5:03 AM - 12 Dec 2017

Senator Gillebrand is a lightweight, a total flunky, begged Trump for contributions, "would do anything for them," and is disloyal, crooked and used. That's a lot of venom to pack into 140 characters, but Trump has obviously mastered the art.

Trump is especially fond of depicting people as begging him for favors, as documented here.

By now, Trump has bashed through so many norms and revealed his pathologies so blatantly and in so many ways, that the fact that he loves to put others down as a way of building himself up is no surprise, nor that the enormous prestige and responsibilities of the presidency have not caused him to temper his behavior. What's more worrisome is that he seems to revel in the cruelty, which means he's not just a bully but a sadist (for examples, click on these links from Alternet, USA Today, the Irish Times, the Chicago Tribune, the book Fire and Fury, and the DailyKos).

But what I find most concerning is that 35 to 45 percent of Americans remain faithful to the bully-in-chief even as he sneaks money out of their pockets to give to giant corporations and the richest one percent. As of January 5, according to the Rasmussen poll, 44 percent of likely voters approve of Trump's job performance, and a remarkable 29 percent strongly approve.

On my grade-school playground, only a handful of sycophants ran with Donald T., basking in the reflected light of his cruelty. But if a third of the kids had rallied around him, joined him in scapegoating, isolating and tormenting one child after another, modeled themselves after him, my sunny and happy elementary school would have become a dark and dangerous place.

I don't know about you, but I don't like where this train of thought is taking us.

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7/17/18--one place is has already taken us is the inexpressibly cruel separation of parents and children at the U.S border, apparently without any mechanism in place to re-unite them.

10/4/18--we saw another ugly glimpse of the sadism of Trump and many of his supporters in his taunting of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford at a rally in Mississippi. As Atlantic author Adam Serwer puts it, "the cruelty is the point."

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*** For a remarkable example of "the gleeful joy of bullying" check out this video of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene harassing Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1393208622054842368

or you can watch the whole premeditated sequence in this longer video. The most striking part starts at 10:30:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK6XEqG3UgE

HOW CLEVER IS A CROW? -- New Caledonian crows carefully craft hooks

In Jean de La Fontaine's fable "Le Corbeau et le Renard" (The Crow and the Fox), it's Mr. Crow who plays the fool, tricked into dropping his morsel of cheese because of flattery from crafty Mr. Fox. However, if de La Fontaine had known about some eye-opening  recent research, he might have switched their roles. Crows, it seems, are nobody's fools.

It turns out that New Caledonian Crows not only use tools, as do many of their corvid cousins, but are the only animals other than humans who spontaneously make and use hooks. Although our ancestors started crafting stone tools more than 2.5 million years ago, it wasn't until about 25 thousand years ago that humans started to make hooks--initially for fishing. Recent research shows that human children younger than age 8 rarely come up with the idea of fashioning a hook to retrieve a reward.

 Goin' fishin'--a New Caledonian Crow uses a hook to snag insects

Credit: James St. Claire

Our closest animal relatives, chimpanzees, also use tools, including hook-shaped twigs, and adult orangutans will make hooks to fish for a reward. However, unlike the New Caledonian Crows, which use their claws and sharp beaks to carefully shape and trim twigs into deep hooks, chimpanzees don't modify the hook-shaped twigs they use. "We have recently discovered that chimpanzees routinely use naturally-hooked stems to fish for algae," says primate expert Christophe Boesch, "but they don't actively craft these hooks. The crows can reshape plant material with their pointed bills, which act like 'precision pliers', but this would be very difficult for chimpanzees with their large fingers."

 Chimpanzee using a twig to fish for termites

Credit: Valerie

The extra skill and effort the crows put into crafting their hooks pays off in how efficient they are at snagging bugs. "We suspected that tools with pronounced hooks are more efficient, and were able to confirm this in controlled experiments with wild-caught crows," says Christian Rutz, who led this research and has been studying New Caledonian crows for ten years. "The deeper the hook, the faster birds winkled bait from holes in wooden logs." The researchers found that the hooked tools allowed crows to catch their prey two to ten times faster.

A month or two ago I saw a plain old American crow fly up to the peak of a multi-story building, land, and then let something drop from its beak. It turned out not to be a morsel of cheese but a walnut, which rolled down the slanted roof, picked up speed as it fell, and cracked open when it hit the pavement. The crow flapped his way down and snacked on the now-available seed. At the time I thought that this Mr. Crow must have dropped his prize by accident. But now, after reading this research report, I'm willing to bet it was quite deliberate. Their brains may be small by our standards, but crows, it seems, make very good use of them.

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You can find a link to the research report in Current Biology here.

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MRI SCANS REVEAL AUTISTIC BRAIN DIFFERENCES AT SIX MONTHS OF AGE

Although symptoms of autism don't usually appear until a child's second year, and most autistic children aren't diagnosed until they are three or older, recent research shows that the brains of 6-month-old infants who will go on to develop autism already differ from those of normal infants.

These findings may lead to earlier diagnosis and more effective treatment for children who are at risk of developing autism.

They also provide more evidence, if that's still needed, that autism is not caused by childhood vaccinations. As Robert Emerson, the study's lead author points out, "If these differences are already present at six months of age, they would represent a biological foundation for autism that is in place before several vaccines on the CDC schedule that are administered after six months of age, including the Measles, Mumps, Rubella (MMR) inoculation, which is typically given at one year."

A child showing autistic symptoms

Credit Kfagan6

Emerson and colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while children slept to track brain size, growth and connectivity in 59 infants who were at high risk for autism because they had autistic older siblings. Twenty percent of them could be expected to develop autism, compared to 1.5 percent of children without autistic siblings.

They found a variety of differences between the brains of infants who went on to develop autism and those who didn't.

In keeping with earlier research, those infants who eventually showed autistic symptoms had a faster rate of growth in brain volume and brain surface area between six months and two years of age. 

The researchers then used advanced artificial intelligence techniques to differentiate between the brains of those infants who did or did not develop autism. Machine-learning programs trained themselves on the brain scans, and were eventually able to identify correctly 82 percent of the children--9 of 11--who would become autistic and 100 percent of those who developed normally.

This very high rate of discrimination was based on nearly 1000 "functional correlations"--how separate regions of the brain connect and work together--that differed between infants who were on autistic versus normal developmental paths.

Schematics representing brain scan signatures at six months that predicted later autism diagnosis in infants. Red bars indicate weaker connections in autistic infant brains, blue bars stronger connections.

[Credit: R.W. Emerson et al., Science Translational Medicine (2017)]

The authors caution that these are preliminary results using state-of-the-art technology, so further research and the development of simpler and less expensive brain-scanning techniques are needed before they can be applied clinically. 

"If future studies confirm these results, detecting brain differences may enable physicians to diagnose and treat autism earlier than they do today," says Diana Bianchi, M.D., Director or the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD).

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), one child out of every 68 in the US will be diagnosed with autism. The earlier that those children can be correctly diagnosed and start to receive treatment--while the brain is most malleable--the better their outcomes.

You can find a summary of an earlier Nature article about this research here, and a link to the abstract of the current study, in Science Translational Medicine, at this URL.

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USING SMARTPHONES OR TABLETS AT BEDTIME IMPAIRS CHILDREN'S SLEEP

If your children are among the 80-plus percent who have one or more media-linked devices in their bedrooms, they are also likely not to be sleeping long enough or deeply enough at night, and to be drowsy during the day.

Sleeping students/Credit: L. Krittaya

Public health researchers at Cardiff University, in Wales, scoured the research literature and found 20 studies involving more than 125,000 students that examined the link between sleep and the presence and use of screen media by children and adolescents worldwide. The results were unequivocal--use of such media at bedtime significantly reduced both the quality and quantity of sleep, and showed up in daytime drowsiness as well, compared to children without access to media at bedtime.

Writing in the October 31, 2016 issue of JAMA Pediatrics, the authors point out that degraded sleep isn't just a matter of a grouchy, hard-to-wake-child or nodding off in class. Impaired sleep in children is linked to poorer nutrition, obesity, weakened immunity, stunted growth and a variety of mental health issues.

“Sleep is an often undervalued but important part of children’s development," says lead author Ben Carter, from the Cardiff University School of Medicine. "With the ever growing popularity of portable media devices, such as smartphones and tablets, the problem of poor sleep amongst children is set to get worse."

Dr. Carter's prescription-- " . . . an integrated approach involving parents, teachers, and healthcare professionals . . . to improve sleep habits near bedtime.”

If you'ld like to read the full article, it's available for free here.