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Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig (@ThinkwingRadio), a listener call-in show  airing live every Monday night from 3-4 PM (CT) on KPFT-FM 90.1 (Houston). My engineers are Don, Leti, and Nibu.

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For the purposes of this show, I operate on two mottoes:

• You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts;
• An educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy.

SIGNOFF QUOTE[s]: “Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.” ~ Frederick Douglass (Part of a speech given by Douglass in 1886 on the 24th anniversary of emancipation in Washington, DC)

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1. TxDOT Starts Work To Remake Houston’s Most Congested Freeway Interchange – Transportation planners are hoping to eliminate a lot of the problems that lead to crashes and backups. By Gail Delaughter | ORG / | Posted on December 26, 2018, 8:00 AM
   1. Danny Perez, a spokesman for TxDOT, says a project the Department has already started is designed to eliminate a lot of the weaving motions that lead to crashes in the hot spot. They want to give drivers more time to make decisions before they have to merge.
   2. “You’ll have increased capacity on connector ramps for instance,” explained Perez. “So if you’re going 610 northbound to 69 going northbound you’ll have a wider connector that will be set further back.”
   3. The project includes higher and wider ramps along with other improvements. Perez says the work could take up five to six years but they’re hoping to finish sooner. …
   4. … The work will cost about $259 million and some of it is funded through Texas Clear Lanes, an initiative to unsnarl the state’s most crowded roadways. …
   5. … a project the Department has already started is designed to eliminate a lot of the weaving motions that lead to crashes in the hot spot. They want to give drivers more time to make decisions before they have to merge. …
2. Number of measles cases continues to rise in Washington [STATE] amid outbreak – Low vaccination rates and a very contagious disease are a risky combination. By Meghan Keneally | COM |JAN 28, 2019
   1. The number of measles cases in Washington continues to grow as an outbreak rages on.
   2. As of Sunday, Clark County public health officials announced that there have now been 34 confirmed cases and nine suspected cases of the disease.
   3. This marks a continued increase in the number of confirmed cases, as there were 31 confirmed on Friday when the governor declared a state of emergency. The day before, there were 25 confirmed cases. …
   4. … The immunization status of those infected is a key factor, and the county’s health website noted that of the 34 confirmed cases, 30 of those individuals were not immunized. The immunization statuses of the remaining four were unverified.
   5. Alan Melnick, the public health director for Clark County, spoke to ABC News on Friday, saying that he expected the numbers to rise because he saw the most effective preventative measure to be further vaccinations, which is not something that can put an immediate end to an ongoing outbreak.
   6. “I think the best thing we can do to prevent this is to have the vaccination rates higher,” Melnick said. …
   7. … One of the key ways in which vaccinations help prevent the spread — and in many cases, the appearance of the disease in so much of the United States today — is because of a tactic called “herd immunity,” where entire communities are effectively protected once immunization rates are sufficiently high.
   8. For measles, herd immunity is achieved when 92 to 95 percent of the population is immune. This protects people who cannot be vaccinated, such as newborn babies and people with severely compromised immune systems. …
   9. … According to the latest county data, 76.5 percent of the county’s 5,680 kindergartners had complete immunizations in the 2017-2018 school year.
   10. Clark County is far from the worst in the state; it has the sixth lowest complete immunization rate. In San Juan County, only 47 percent of kindergartners got their complete immunizations.
   11. “This is a self-inflicted wound,” Hotez said of the low vaccination rates in the Pacific Northwest.
3. From “the Humanities to ‒>Humanics: A way to ‘robot-proof’ your career?, By Tim McDonald | COM | 28 January 2019
   1. To prepare for a future where AI will likely disrupt entire industries, some say we’ll have to rethink how we educate future generations.
   2. As artificial intelligence becomes both more useful and more widespread, workers everywhere are becoming anxious about how a new age of automation might affect their career prospects.
   3. A recent study by Pew Research found that in 10 advanced and emerging economies, most workers expect computers will do much of the work currently done by humans within 50 years. Workers are clearly anxious about the effects on the job market of artificial intelligence and automation.
   4. Estimates about how much of the workforce could be automated vary from about 9% to 47%….
   5. … Future-proofing your career is less about picking a safe job and more about constantly updating your skills throughout your career, according to Northeastern University president Joseph Aoun, who wrote Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. …
   6. He says education needs to change dramatically if workers are to adapt to this new environment. His solution, which he calls humanics, has three basic pillars:
      1. Technical ability: understanding how machines function and how to interact with them. As both artificial intelligence and robotics become ever more capable, machines will step into roles once monopolised by humans. Some employees won’t last, but others will find themselves working with machines, and probably being vastly more productive as a result. Workers with a grounding in coding and engineering principles will be better placed to thrive in this new kind of workplace.
      2. Data discipline: navigating the sea of information that’s generated by these machines. Workers will need data literacy to read, analyse and use the almost bottomless troves of information that are increasingly guiding everything from major business decisions to stock picks to purchasing decisions.
      3. And the human discipline: “which is what we humans can do that machines for the foreseeable future, cannot emulate.” Aoun says this includes creativity, cultural agility, empathy and the ability to take information from one context and apply it to another. In educational terms, this means less emphasis on the classroom and a greater emphasis on experiential learning. …
   7. … “A generation ago, the half-life of a skill was about 26 years, and that was the model for a career. Today, it’s four and half years and dropping,” says Indranil Roy, the head of the Future of Work Centre of Excellence, set up by global consultancy Deloitte.
   8. Aoun says the rapid pace of change isn’t necessarily a negative, but it does mean you’ll probably never outgrow homework. It also means universities will need to shift their focus towards lifelong education and training mid-career workers.
4. Newly Independent Howard Schultz Depicts Democrats As Health Care Radicals – The billionaire and former Starbucks CEO took on his former party Sunday and explained why he is considering running for president as an independent. By Maxwell Strachan | COM | 01/27/2019 09:37 pm ET Updated 2 hours ago
   1. Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz kicked off a potential 2020 presidential run on Sunday by ripping his former party, depicting the Democrats’ health care proposals as unrealistic and financially unfeasible.
   2. “Every American deserves the right to have access to quality health care,” Schultz told “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley. “But what the Democrats are proposing is something that is as false as the wall ― and that is free health care for all, which the country cannot afford.” …
   3. … During the interview, Schultz said he is “seriously” considering running for president “as a centrist independent, outside of the two-party system.” Asked why he wouldn’t run as a Democrat, the self-described “lifelong Democrat” said both parties are “consistently not doing what’s necessary on behalf of the American people” and are instead engaging in “revenge politics.”
   4. “I look at both parties, we see extremes on both sides,” he said. “We are sitting today with approximately $21.5 trillion of debt, which is a reckless example ― not only of Republicans, but of Democrats as well ― as a reckless failure of their constitutional responsibility.”
   5. Schultz has long expressed concern about the national debt. …
   6. … The possibility that Schultz may run as an independent candidate has already rankled Democrats. Former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro, who has announced he plans to run for president as a Democrat, said Schultz running “would provide Donald Trump with his best hope of getting re-elected.”
   7. When asked if he was worried his own presidential run could help Trump win another four years in the White House, Schultz made it clear he didn’t buy that line of thinking. …
   8. … Schultz had a net worth of $3 billion as of 2017. …
5. The government shutdown cost the economy $11 billion, including a permanent $3 billion loss, Congressional Budget Office says – The federal government shutdown cost the economy $11 billion, according to a new analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office; Although most of the damage to the economy will be reversed as federal workers return to their jobs, the CBO estimated $3 billion in economic activity is permanently lost; Overall, the CBO projected economic growth will slow this year to 2.3 percent, compared with the 3.1 percent rate last year, as the benefits of the new tax law begin to fade, By Ylan Mui | @ylanmui | com| Jan 28, 2019
   1. The federal government shutdown cost the economy $11 billion, according to a new analysis from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, reflecting lost output from federal workers, delayed government spending and reduced demand.
   2. The report, which was released Monday, estimated a hit of $3 billion, or 0.1 percent, to economic activity during the fourth quarter of 2018. The impact was projected to be greater during the first quarter of 2019: $8 billion, or 0.2 percent of GDP.
   3. Although most of the damage to the economy will be reversed as federal workers return to their jobs, the CBO estimated $3 billion in economic activity is permanently lost after a quarter of the government was closed for nearly 35 days.
   4. “Among those who experienced the largest and most direct negative effects are federal workers who faced delayed compensation and private-sector entities that lost business,” the report said. “Some of those private-sector entities will never recoup that lost income.”
   5. The analysis does not incorporate some indirect effects of the shutdown, such as the halt in some federal permits and reduced access to loans.
6. Pelosi Embraces Legislation To Effectively Prevent Future Government Shutdowns – And she isn’t the only one to do so after the just-completed 35-day shit show. By Sam Stein |COM |01.25.19 9:07 PM ET
   1. With America’s longest shutdown ending [last] Friday, lawmakers are turning their attention to another dramatic political objective: making sure such episodes can never take place again.
   2. In a briefing with reporters and columnists on Friday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) became the highest official yet to formally embrace legislation that would effectively prevent the government from closing. And she hinted that she may even push a proposal in the near future.
   3. “[Former Rep. Dale Kildee (D-MI)] had a bill that I’m hoping we might be able to put forward,” Pelosi explained. “And what that bill said is that … “any appropriations bill that does not get agreed upon within a timely fashion by the date, you automatically go into a CR [Continuing Resolution]” — a resolution to keep current spending levels going— “until you do.” …
   4. MIKE: THERE ARE OTHER BILXxLS BEING PUT FORWARD WITH VARIATIONS, BUT THE IDEA ITSELF SEEMS TO BE ONE WHOSE TIME HAS COME.
7. Americans support investigating Trump, but many are skeptical that inquiries will be fair, new poll finds, By Scott Clement | WASHINGTONPOST.COM |January 27, 2019 at 12:01 AM
   1. The American people have mixed feelings about investigating President Trump, with clear majorities wanting newly empowered Democrats to dig into his personal finances and foreign ties but most believing that Congress should not begin impeachment proceedings, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll….

… Meanwhile, public support for impeachment has dropped in recent months, the poll shows.

In the August Post-ABC poll, conducted immediately after Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to campaign finance and other charges and personally implicated Trump in some of his acts, 49 percent said Congress should begin impeachment proceedings that could lead to Trump being removed from office, while 46 percent said Congress should not.

In the new survey, a smaller 40 percent support impeachment proceedings, while a 55 percent majority oppose them. …

… Just over 6 in 10 Democrats say they are confident the report will be fair and evenhanded, while slightly more than 3 in 10 report “just some” confidence or less.

Among self-identified independents, 40 percent are confident Mueller’s final report will be fair, while 53 percent express less faith. Confidence drops to 22 percent among Republicans.

It is not clear whether the public’s wariness toward Mueller’s forthcoming report reflects skepticism in the special counsel himself, anticipation of its findings or the nature of its release. A poll this month by the Pew Research Center found 55 percent of adults saying they are “very” or “somewhat” confident Mueller is conducting a fair investigation, attitudes consistent with surveys since late 2017. …

… In Congress, the poll shows … Roughly 8 in 10 Democrats and about 6 in 10 independents support Democrats probing Trump’s relationship with Putin, which has come under increased scrutiny following a Washington Post report that Trump concealed details of their face-to-face meetings.

Nearly three-quarters of Republicans oppose Democrats investigating possible collusion, while nearly two-thirds oppose investigating Trump’s relationship with Putin and suspected financial ties with foreign governments. Roughly one-third of Republicans, however, support investigations on these latter issues. …

1. ow Trump Could Wind up Making Globalism Great Again – OK, so globalism was never great in the first place. But the rise of rank nationalists could finally—perversely—spark an era of progress and cooperation for all humanity. BY Robert Wright ((Robert Wright) | COM | 01.17.19 06:00 am
   1. A few days before the 2016 election, journalist Andrew Sullivan wrote this about Donald Trump: “He has no concept of a nonzero-sum engagement, in which a deal can be beneficial for both sides. A win-win scenario is intolerable to him, because mastery of others is the only moment when he is psychically at peace.” …
   2. …[I]n Trump’s hierarchy of bliss, dominance does seem to rank at the top. “I love to crush the other side and take the benefits,” he wrote in a book called Think Big. “Why? Because there is nothing greater. For me it is even better than sex, and I love sex.” He went on to observe: “You hear lots of people say that a great deal is when both sides win. That is a bunch of crap. In a great deal you win—not the other side. You crush the opponent and come away with something better for yourself.”
   3. So it makes sense that, two years after Trump entered office, Sullivan’s game-theoretical framing has caught on. The zero-sum game—in which the players’ fortunes are inversely correlated, so that for one player to win the other must lose—has become a standard paradigm for the Trump presidency. …
   4. … Now we’ve got a president who not only resists playing nonzero-­sum games but actively fans emotions that impede the wise playing of them. And as if that weren’t enough, the fanning of those emotions can recalibrate the games, making lose-lose outcomes even worse than they would be otherwise. …
   5. … There’s reason to think that, in a weird way, the Trump presidency…could be a roundabout path to a higher plane. …
   6. … Donald Trump—who used his most recent address at the United Nations to denounce global governance—may be, here and there, and unbeknownst to himself, laying the groundwork for future global governance. And it’s a kind of global governance that could help resolve some of the tensions that made him president. Two years from now, or six years from now, as we crawl through the wreckage of Trump’s tenure, we’ll find things worth building on. …
   7. … Threats … which could bring pain to various regions and destabilize the whole planet, give nations an incentive to cooperate in fending them off. But there’s also a disincentive: Cooperative solutions often carry shared costs or constraints. Nations need to refrain from making certain weapons if they want other nations to refrain, open their biological labs to inspection if they want other nations to open theirs, and so on. …
   8. … [Trump] embodies a backlash that’s not surprising, given the dislocations brought by rapid social transformation.
   9. [And yet,] edifices of international governance that draw support from people who are now fire-breathing enemies of international governance? Yet there are reasons to think this is not so far-fetched.
   10. For example: … The North American trade deal his administration just negotiated—the United States-­Mexico-Canada Agreement, aka Nafta 2.0—features a good example of a populist policy realized through an instrument of governance these populists now detest.
   11. When NAFTA was being negotiated in the 1990s, American labor unions, worried about losing jobs to Mexico, lobbied for provisions that would raise Mexican wages—whether by strengthening labor unions in Mexico or by raising wages there more directly. And NAFTA did include provisions that in theory could do that, but they were oblique and ineffectual, partly because business people on both sides of the border opposed stronger ones.
   12. Trump’s trade negotiators pushed for and got something stronger: a requirement that 40 percent of the content of cars that trade freely within North America be made by workers earning at least $16 an hour. The idea is that Mexican factories can either raise wages or watch jobs migrate north. And though Mexican governments, in deference to the wishes of Mexico’s business class, have traditionally opposed such provisions, the new left-wing Mexican government likes them. …
   13. … This one provision may seem like a small thing, [but it] can in principle serve various constituencies. They can lean right or lean left. … one possible, far-off scenario: A future version of the WTO could authorize punitive tariffs against—or even deny membership to—nations that don’t let unions organize. It could set baseline environmental or even workplace safety standards for factories in member nations, which not only would make for a cleaner environment and safer jobs but also would raise production costs in low-wage countries, making globalization less threatening to workers in affluent countries. …
   14. … A writer in the conservative National Review, expressing opposition to the $16 per hour wage requirement, noted with disapproval that “many Trump supporters applaud this imposition” and asked, “Isn’t it suspicious that the left-winger [Canadian Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau and the right-winger Trump both like this measure? The unions also dig it.”
   15. Yes, the unions do dig it. Because they realize that to serve their members in a globalized economy, they can’t rely on national policies alone; they have to embrace international governance and steer it left. Any politician who wants to attract the kinds of voters unions represent would be well advised to take this insight seriously. That’s why populist leaders who are now described as “nationalist” and “right wing” could wind up making peace with global governance of a left-leaning kind. …
   16. … Donald Trump is not a one-off. He embodies a backlash that’s not surprising, given the dislocations brought by rapid social transformation—in this case, the epic, once-in-a-planet’s-lifetime movement of social organization to the planetary level. …
   17. … Given that globalization is driven by inexorable technological change, and that global governance is needed to keep an interconnected planet from self-destructing, having a powerful political movement that sees these two things as mortal enemies is dangerous. If heading off that danger requires change that sounds radical, maybe radical change is in order. …
   18. … If global governance is going to work, … its rules will have to be widely acknowledged and heeded. International law — … which typically lacks a mechanism of firm enforcement — will have to carry more weight than it has carried. … [T]he United States, the world’s most powerful nation, will have to evince consistent respect for it. This means the American establishment, including lots of elites who oppose Trump, will have to start evincing such respect.
   19. … Trump offers clear guidance, even if it’s mainly a kind of reverse guidance. His basically zero-sum perspective shows us how not to conceive of a world that is rife with nonzero-sum games. …
2. World’s Second human case of rat hepatitis discovered, By Nina Avramova, CNN, Updated 12:20 PM ET, Thu November 22, 2018
   1. A second case of rat hepatitis E has been reported in a human in Hong Kong, making it also the second recorded globally. …
   2. … A 70-year-old woman from the Wong Tai Sin district of Hong Kong was diagnosed with the disease this month, according to Hong Kong’s Department of Health. She does not recall having direct contact with rodents or their excreta (feces and bodily fluids) and didn’t notice any rodents in her residence, the Department of Health said in a statement. The woman was admitted to a public hospital on May 4, 2017, for headache, anorexia, malaise, abdominal pain and palpitations, which she had developed since May 1, 2017.
   3. She soon recovered and was discharged four days later, on May 8. The woman had underlying illnesses, according to the Department of Health. …
   4. In September, the first case was reported, involving a 56-year old man. Before this, it was not known that the disease could be passed from rats to humans.
   5. After that case, the Centre for Health Protection of the Department of Health provided blood samples from patients who had tested positive for immune protein called anti-HEV immunoglobulin — a sign someone is infected with hepatitis E, known as HEV. Further investigations by Hong Kong University detected elements of DNA evident of rat HEV.
   6. “Rat hepatitis E virus now joins this list of infections as an important pathogen that may be transmitted from rats to humans,” Dr. Siddharth Sridhar, clinical assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong, previously said, adding that the risk of rat hepatitis E affecting humans has been underestimated. …
   7. … The apparent clustering of the two cases is of concern, and the Centre for Health Protection will continue to closely monitor the situation, Leung wrote, adding that the sources and routes of the infections could not be determined.
   8. “It is likely that the virus can be found commonly in rats, with one study in Vietnam suggesting that more than 10% of them may have been infected,” Martin Hibberd, professor of emerging infectious diseases at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, wrote in an email. “Infection can be acquired by close contact with rats, or perhaps more likely through rat contaminated food or water.”
   9. … The increasing number of case observations in Hong Kong is, according to Hibberd, “likely at this stage to be due to improved diagnostic tools and increased surveillance, as the clinical presentation can be confused with other diseases.” …
   10. … The human form of hepatitis E is typically transmitted through contaminated water and is estimated to infect 20 million people worldwide, resulting in 3.3 million people showing symptoms each year, according to the World Health Organization. It caused approximately 44,000 deaths in 2015, making up 3.3% of all deaths from viral hepatitis.
   11. The animal form of the disease is thought to infect wild boars, domestic pigs and deer, as well as rats and other rodents.
3. AmericansWant to Believe Jobs Are the Solution to Poverty. They’re Not – unemployment is down and jobs are going unfilled. But for people withoutmuch education, the real question is: Do those jobs pay enough to liveon?, By Matthew Desmond |NY Times | Sept. 11, 2018
   1. … These days, we’re told that the American economy is strong. Unemployment is down, the Dow Jones industrial average is north of 25,000 and millions of jobs are going unfilled. But for people like Vanessa, the question is not, Can I land a job? (The answer is almost certainly, Yes, you can.) Instead the question is, What kinds of jobs are available to people without much education? By and large, the answer is: jobs that do not pay enough to live on.
   2. In recent decades, the nation’s tremendous economic growth has not led to broad social uplift. Economists call it the “productivity-pay gap” — the fact that over the last 40 years, the economy has expanded and corporate profits have risen, but real wages have remained flat for workers without a college education. Since 1973, American productivity has increased by 77 percent, while hourly pay has grown by only 12 percent. If the federal minimum wage tracked productivity, it would be more than $20 an hour, not today’s poverty wage of $7.25.
   3. American workers are being shut out of the profits they are helping to generate. The decline of unions is a big reason. During the 20th century, inequality in America decreased when unionization increased, but economic transformations and political attacks have crippled organized labor, emboldening corporate interests and disempowering the rank and file. This imbalanced economy explains why America’s poverty rate has remained consistent over the past several decades, even as per capita welfare spending has increased. It’s not that safety-net programs don’t help; on the contrary, they lift millions of families above the poverty line each year. But one of the most effective antipoverty solutions is a decent-paying job, and those have become scarce for people like Vanessa. Today, 41.7 million laborers — nearly a third of the American work force — earn less than $12 an hour, and almost none of their employers offer health insurance.
   4. The Bureau of Labor Statistics defines a “working poor” person as someone below the poverty line who spent at least half the year either working or looking for employment. In 2016, there were roughly 7.6 million Americans who fell into this category. Most working poor people are over 35, while fewer than five in 100 are between the ages of 16 and 19. In other words, the working poor are not primarily teenagers bagging groceries or scooping ice cream in paper hats. They are adults — and often parents — wiping down hotel showers and toilets, taking food orders and bussing tables, eviscerating chickens at meat-processing plants, minding children at 24-hour day care centers, picking berries, emptying trash cans, stacking grocery shelves at midnight, driving taxis and Ubers, answering customer-service hotlines, smoothing hot asphalt on freeways, teaching community-college students as adjunct professors and, yes, bagging groceries and scooping ice cream in paper hats.
   5. Americans often assume that the poor do not work. According to a 2016 survey conducted by the American Enterprise Institute, nearly two-thirds of respondents did not think most poor people held a steady job; in reality, that year a majority of nondisabled working-age adults were part of the labor force. Slightly over one-third of respondents in the survey believed that most welfare recipients would prefer to stay on welfare rather than earn a living. These sorts of assumptions about the poor are an American phenomenon. A 2013 study by the sociologist Ofer Sharone found that unemployed workers in the United States blame themselves, while unemployed workers in Israel blame the hiring system. When Americans see a homeless man cocooned in blankets, we often wonder how he failed. When the French see the same man, they wonder how the state failed him.
   6. Researchers set out to study welfare dependency in the 1980s and 1990s, when this issue dominated public debate. They didn’t find much evidence of it. Most people started using cash welfare after a divorce or separation and didn’t stay long on the dole, even if they returned to welfare periodically. One study found that 90 percent of young women on welfare stopped relying on it within two years of starting the program, but most of them returned to welfare sometime down the road. Even at its peak, welfare did not function as a dependency trap for a majority of recipients; rather, it was something people relied on when they were between jobs or after a family crisis. A 1988 review in Science concluded that “the welfare system does not foster reliance on welfare so much as it acts as insurance against temporary misfortune.”
4. SomeBacteria Are Becoming ‘More Tolerant’ Of Hand Sanitizers, Study Finds, By Melody Schreiber [NPR.org] August 2, 20184:22 PM ET
   1. In the early 2000s, hospitals across Australia began installing more hand-sanitizer dispensers in their rooms and hallways for staff, visitors and patients to use. Research showed these alcohol-based disinfectants helped battle staph infections in patients and certain kinds of drug-resistant bacteria. And rates of these infections went down.
   2. But other infections didn’t drop when people started using the sanitizer stations. In fact, certain infections went up.
   3. In the early 2000s, hospitals across Australia began installing more hand-sanitizer dispensers in their rooms and hallways for staff, visitors and patients to use. Research showed these alcohol-based disinfectants helped battle staph infections in patients and certain kinds of drug-resistant bacteria. And rates of these infections went down.
   4. But other infections didn’t drop when people started using the sanitizer stations. In fact, certain infections went up.
   5. In particular, enterococcal infections — caused by bacteria that affect the digestive tract, bladder, heart and other parts of the body — started increasing.
   6. This wasn’t only happening in Australia. Countries around the world saw rises in this type of infection even as hand sanitizer became more popular. Globally enterococci make up ten percent of bacterial infections acquired in the hospital. In North America and Europe, they are a leading cause of sepsis, a deadly blood infection.
   7. Now, researchers say, they may have found the cause. Blame it on the alcohol.
   8. New research published by Science Translational Medicine on Wednesday shows that several strains of these bacteria have begun adjusting to alcohol-based hand sanitizers. They’re not resistant to the alcohol — at least, not yet — t they’re becoming “more tolerant” of it, the authors write. That means the bacteria were able to survive for longer periods of time after being doused with alcohol.
   9. The researchers used different strengths of alcohol concentrations to combat the bacteria, starting with 23 percent. Eventually, at a 70-percent alcohol mixture, the bacteria were conquered. Typically, hand sanitizers are 60 percent alcohol.
   10. To make matters worse, many of these alcohol-tolerant bacteria are resistant to multiple drugs as well. Half of the strains the researchers studied cannot be treated with vancomycin, a last-line antibiotic. That means the bacteria are spreading more easily within hospitals, and there aren’t many options for treatment.
   11. The researchers were surprised by their findings.
   12. “To our knowledge this was the first time anyone had shown hospital bacteria becoming tolerant to alcohols,” says Timothy Stinear, a coauthor of the study and a researcher at the University of Melbourne’s Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity. …
   13. … Health-care institutions trying to control the spread of these infections will need to “adhere rigorously to hand-hygiene protocols,”Stinear says — and probably institute additional measures to stop the spread, such as increased hand-washing with soap after coming into contact with the bacteria. …
   14. … Lance Price, a professor at the George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health and the founding director of GW’s Antibiotic Resistance Action Center, was also surprised by the findings. … “If you’re washing your hands less because that alcohol-based hand sanitizer makes you feel confident that your hands are clean,” Price says, “all of a sudden you can become a vehicle for alcohol-resistant organisms.”
   15. The research is still clear that alcohol-based hand sanitizers are more effective at battling some bacteria, like those causing staph infections. However, this study indicates that other bacteria are best cleaned off with simple soap and water.
   16. “It’s the physical action of lifting and moving them off your skin, and letting them run down the drain,” Price says.
   17. “We have to be careful about this new trend towards heavy reliance on alcohol-based hand sanitizers,” Price continues. “Soap and water should be our number-one protection” — both in hospitals and for personal use….
5. New Drug Wipes Out Malaria In A Single Dose — But There’s One Hitch, by  Michaeleen Doucleff  [NPR.org] July 26, 20181:02 PM ET
   1. The world now has a potent, new weapon against malaria — one that can wipe out the parasite from a person’s body with a single dose.
   2. But before many people around the world can use it, scientists have to overcome a big obstacle. …
   3. … In certain people, tafenoquine can cause red blood cells to burst open and die. As a result, people can become anemic, and in some instances, this can be lethal.
   4. Here in the U.S., there is a lab test available to see which people will respond poorly to Krintafel. It’s called a “G6PD” test. The FDA and the World Health Organization require a health care worker to give this test before prescribing tafenoquine or other similar drugs.
   5. Right now, this test requires expensive machinery and a high level of expertise to run it, o says.
   6. “It requires the kind of laboratory facilities that are not available where most people with malaria seek care,” he says.
   7. But Domingo and his colleagues are trying to change that. Over the past few years, several companies and nonprofits have been working together to develop an affordable, easy-to-use test that runs off a battery. …
   8. … In terms of cost, GlaxoSmithKline and Medicines for Malaria Venture say it’s too early to say how much tafenoquine will cost in poor countries.
   9. “[We] are committed to making tafenoquine accessible and affordable on a not-for-profit basis to those who need it most,” a spokesperson for GlaxoSmithKline wrote in an email to NPR. “A shared goal is for the cost of tafenoquine not to be a barrier to access.”
6. Meteor Explodes with 2.1 Kilotons of Force 25 Miles Above US Air Force Base in Greenland, By Jack Phillips [TheEPOCHTIMES.COM] August 3, 2018 Last Updated: August 3, 2018
   1. A meteor exploded with 2.1 kilotons of force above a U.S. Air Force base in July, but the military has made no mention of the event, according to reports.
   2. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said that a meteor exploded 26 miles above U.S. Air Base Thule on July 25. It was detected by … the early missile warning radar at Thule Air Base, The Aviationist reported on Aug. 3.
   3. The Aviationist’s Tom Demerly, … reported on the incident, [and] wrote in an analysis that it’s concerning because there was no public warning from the U.S. government about the meteor blast. “Had it entered at a more perpendicular angle, it would have struck the earth with significantly greater force,” he wrote.
   4. [As of August 3,] The Air Force has remained silent about the incident.

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