Ontario’s Deadly Swine Flu Surge, 24 dead in 72 hours

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In a shocking surge, 24 Ontario residents have died in less than 72 hours from Swine Flu, the Public Health Agency of Canada reported on its website.

Ontario’s startling fatalities reported between November 10 and 11 a.m. EST on November 12 catapults the death toll from 37 reported on Nov. 10 to a total of 61. That is twice the figure of dead in Quebec and the highest of any province in Canada.

See also: B.C. Hospitals working over capacity.

Hospitals from coast to coast are swamped with admissions and visits to emergency departments in the past week with other provinces reporting record admissions from Swine Flu since its outbreak was noticed in April.

Nova Scotia and Manitoba reported one death each between Nov. 10 and Nov. 12 to take Canada’s national fatality toll to 161 with much of the spike happening since the second wave of Swine Flu began in October.

On November 10 at 11 a.m. EST, Ontario’s death toll stood at 37 and the Canadian national total was at 135.

46 Canadians have died between November 5 and November 12 with heavy rates of hospitalizations across the country.

Ontario government officials could not be reached last night to comment about the 24 deaths.

The latest federal figures show B.C. has 23 deaths with eight occurring in just one week, Alberta has 20, Saskatchewan 5, Manitoba 8, Ontario 61, Quebec 35, Nova Scotia 2, Newfoundland and Labrador 5 and one each in Yukon and Nunavut.

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Million Hit By Illness Worse Than Swine Flu In Ukraine

A deadly plague could sweep across Europe, doctors fear, after an outbreak of a virus in Ukraine plunged the country and its neighbors into a state of panic.

A cocktail of three flu viruses are reported to have mutated into a single pneumonic plague, which it is believed may be far more dangerous than swine flu. The death toll has reached 189 and more than 1 million people have been infected, most of them in the nine regions of Western Ukraine.

President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko has called in the World Health Organisation and a team of nine specialists are carrying out tests in Kiev and Lviv to identify the virus. Samples have been sent to London for analysis.

President Yushchenko said: “People are dying. The epidemic is killing doctors. This is absolutely inconceivable in the 21st Century.”

In a TV interview, the President added: “Unlike similar epidemics in other countries, three causes of serious viral infections came together simultaneously in Ukraine – two seasonal flus and the Californian flu

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2 Earthquakes Strike Off Southern California Coast

Two moderate earthquakes have struck under the ocean near the Channel Islands off the Southern California coast.

The U.S. Geological Survey reports a magnitude 4.5 earthquake struck the sea floor about 14 miles east of San Nicolas Island at 2:45 p.m Sunday.

A magnitude 3.6 quake hit three minutes later in the same spot, 56 miles west of Santa Catalina Island, in an area where the sea floor is about 2,000 feet below the surface.

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Concerns Over Superbugs In Our Food Supply

About two years ago, dozens of workers at a large chicken hatchery in Arkansas began experiencing mysterious skin rashes, with painful lumps scattered over their hands, arms, and legs.

“They hurt real bad,” says Joyce Long, 48, a 32-year veteran of the hatchery, where until recently, workers handled eggs and chicks with bare hands. “When we went and got cultured, doctors told us we had a superbug.”

Its name, she learned, was MRSA, or methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. This form of staph bacteria developed a mutation that resists antibiotics (including methicillin), making it hard to treat, even lethal. According to the CDC, certain types of MRSA infections kill 18,000 Americans a year — more than die from AIDS.

via Concerns over superbugs in our food supply – Food safety- msnbc.com.

Tsunami Threat Looms Over Pacific Northwest

The Pacific Northwest needs to brace itself for a massive tsunami that will likely destroy homes, hurl cars against buildings, and threaten the lives of tens of thousands of people, experts say.

The northwest is due for a big earthquake-generated tsunami, just like the waves that slammed Samoa last month and the Indian Ocean in 2004.However, the region hasn’t adequately prepared for the deluge, said geotechnical engineer Yumei Wang, of the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries in Portland.

Her proposal: Build a series of tsunami evacuation buildings up and down the coast.Wang has helped design a prototype for Cannon Beach, Ore., which is seriously considering building the first tsunami refuge in the United States.

via Tsunami Threat Looms Over Pacific Northwest : Discovery News.

Mystery Halo Cloud Appears Over Moscow Russia

The pale halo has social networkers speculating that it could be either a UFO or a sign from God. But experts say it is simply a natural phenomenon.Talking to the Daily Mail, a spokesman from Moscow’s weather forecasting service said: “Several fronts have been passing through Moscow recently, there was an intrusion of the Arctic air too, the sun was shining from the west – this is how the effect was produced.

“This is purely an optical effect, although it does look impressive,” he added.

“If you look closer, you can see sun rays coming through that cloud. Most likely, the sun was setting when the video was being made.

“If you observe clouds regularly, you may see many other astonishing things. Clouds of the same class may look absolutely different in different areas,” he said.

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Earthquakes Continue To Rock Planet With 3 In South Pacific

Three major earthquakes struck within an hour and 10 minutes Thursday morning near Vanuatu in the South Pacific, prompting a tsunami warning that was quickly lifted. They were part of series of nine moderate-to-major quakes that rattled the region in just over four hours.

The first quake, with a magnitude of 7.8, struck at 9:03 a.m. (6:03 p.m. ET) at a depth of 35 km (22 miles) and an epicenter 295 km (180 miles) north-northwest of Luganville, Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu, the U.S. Geological Survey said.

A second quake, with a magnitude of 7.7, struck 15 minutes later at the same depth and an epicenter of 340 km (210 miles) north-northwest of Luganville.

The third quake, with a magnitude of 7.1, struck at 10:13 a.m. (7:13 p.m. ET) at about the same depth and an epicenter of 280 km (175 miles) north-northwest of Luganville.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued and then quickly lifted a regional tsunami warning and watch for parts of the Pacific near the first earthquake’s epicenter.

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Earthquake Expert Says Quake Activity Building Up

More than 1,100 people have died because of a massive 7.6 magnitude earthquake that shook Indonesia 24 hours ago. On Tuesday, a giant earthquake near the American Samoan Islands caused death and destruction and the western United States has seen two sizable earthquakes since 10:30 a.m. Wednesday.

On Thursday earthquakes have shaken parts of California and Nevada. The biggest quake was just 140 miles west of Las Vegas in Keeler, California it certainly has experts on earthquakes in Las Vegas taking notice.

There are several major faults running through Southern Nevada including one less than a mile from the Las Vegas Strip.

Those have earthquake expert Burt Slemmons watching closely. “It could be building up here and in California,” he said. Slemmons has been chasing fault lines for 55 years. He is a retired professor from UNR.

Slemmons helped route and design the Alaskan pipeline so it could survive a magnitude seven earthquake. He says Las Vegas could have one anytime and he predicts it will be a 6.0 or larger.

“I have earthquake tape and putty under potentially toppling articles. I have anchored my bookcases which is one of the major kinds of damage.”

via Earthquake Expert Says Quake Activity Building Up – Las Vegas Now.

Tsunami Strikes American Samoa After 8.3-Magnitude Quake

A tsunami swept into Pago Pago, American Samoa, shortly after an earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 8.3 erupted in the area. There were no immediate reports of injuries or structural damage Tuesday.

Fili Sagapolutele, who works at the Samoa News, says the water flowed inland about 100 yards before receding, leaving some cars stuck in the mud.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Honolulu issued a tsunami warning for American Samoa and other areas of the Pacific, including New Zealand. A tsunami watch was posted for other areas, including Hawaii and the Marshall Islands.

There are reports that some beaches in Hawaii are being closed as a precaution. Police are at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center to offer protection and assistance in the event that a large wave forms.

American Samoa, a group of islands, is a U.S. territory located in the South Pacific, about 2,300 miles south of Hawaii. American Samoa is slightly larger than Washington, D.C., with a population of 65,628. The population of Pago Pago is approximately 11,000.

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Dust Turns Sydney Sky Red, Alarms Residents

Sydney Australia residents have woken to a red haze unlike anything seen before by residents or weather experts, as the sun struggles to pierce a thick blanket of dust cloaking the city this morning.

Callers flooded talkback radio, others hit social networking sites and scores of emails were received from smh.com.au readers as Sydney residents expressed their amazement at this morning’s conditions.

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Swine Flu Could Kill Millions Worldwide Lacking Vaccines

The swine flu pandemic could kill millions and cause anarchy in the world’s poorest nations unless £900m can be raised from rich countries to pay for vaccines and antiviral medicines, says a UN report leaked to the Observer.

The disclosure will provoke concerns that health officials will not be able to stem the growth of the worldwide H1N1 pandemic in developing countries. If the virus takes hold in the poorest nations, millions could die and the economies of fragile countries could be destroyed.

Health ministers around the globe were sent the warning on Thursday in a report on the costs of averting a humanitarian disaster in the next few months. It comes as officials inside the World Health Organisation, the UN’s public health body, said they feared they would not be able to raise half that amount because of the global downturn.

Gregory Hartl of WHO said the report required an urgent response from rich nations. “There needs to be recognition that the whole world is affected by this pandemic and the chain is only as strong as its weakest link. We have seen how H1N1 has taken hold in richer nations and in the southern hemisphere. We have been given fair warning and must act soon,” he said.

The report was drawn up by UN officials over the last two months. It was commissioned in July after Ban ki-moon, the UN’s secretary general, expressed concern that the H1NI virus could have a severe impact on the world’s poorest countries.

It paints a disastrous picture for the world’s most vulnerable people unless there is immediate action. “There is a window in which it will be possible to help poor countries get as ready as they can for H1N1 and that window is closing rapidly,” it says.

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New Theory Says Time is Disappearing from the Universe

Remember a little thing called the space-time continuum? Well what if the time part of the equation was literally running out? New evidence is suggesting that time is slowly disappearing from our universe, and will one day vanish completely. This radical new theory may explain a cosmological mystery that has baffled scientists for years.

Scientists previously have measured the light from distant exploding stars to show that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. They assumed that these supernovae are spreading apart faster as the universe ages. Physicists also assumed that a kind of anti-gravitational force must be driving the galaxies apart, and started to call this unidentified force “dark energy”.

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The team’s proposal, which will be published in the journal Physical Review D, dismisses dark energy as fiction. Instead, Prof Senovilla says, the appearance of acceleration is caused by time itself gradually slowing down, like a clock with a run-down battery.

“We do not say that the expansion of the universe itself is an illusion,” he explains. “What we say it may be an illusion is the acceleration of this expansion – that is, the possibility that the expansion is, and has been, increasing its rate.”

If time gradually slows “but we naively kept using our equations to derive the changes of the expansion with respect of ‘a standard flow of time’, then the simple models that we have constructed in our paper show that an “effective accelerated rate of the expansion” takes place.”

Currently, astronomers are able to discern the expansion speed of the universe using the so-called “red shift” technique. This technique relies on the understanding that stars moving away appear redder in color than ones moving towards us. Scientists look for supernovae of certain types that provide a sort of benchmark. However, the accuracy of these measurements depends on time remaining invariable throughout the universe. If time is slowing down, according to this new theory, our solitary time dimension is slowly turning into a new space dimension. Therefore the far-distant, ancient stars seen by cosmologists would from our perspective, look as though they were accelerating.

“Our calculations show that we would think that the expansion of the universe is accelerating,” says Prof Senovilla. The theory bases it’s idea on one particular variant of superstring theory, in which our universe is confined to the surface of a membrane, or brane, floating in a higher-dimensional space, known as the “bulk”. In billions of years, time would cease to be time altogether.

“Then everything will be frozen, like a snapshot of one instant, forever,” Senovilla told New Scientist magazine. “Our planet will be long gone by then.”

Though radical and in many way unprecedented, these ideas are not without support. Gary Gibbons, a cosmologist at Cambridge University, say the concept has merit. “We believe that time emerged during the Big Bang, and if time can emerge, it can also disappear – that’s just the reverse effect.”

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MRSA ‘Superbug’ Found On West Coast Public Beaches

Public beaches may be one source of the surging prevalence of the superbug known as multidrug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, researchers here said Saturday.

A study by researchers at the University of Washington has for the first time identified methicillin-resistant Staph aureus (MRSA) in marine water and beach sand from seven public beaches on the Puget Sound.

The researchers identified Staph bacteria on nine of 10 public beaches that they tested. Seven of 13 Staph aureus samples, found on five beaches, were multidrug resistant, says lead investigator Marilyn Roberts.

“Our results suggest that public beaches may be a reservoir for possible transmission of MRSA,” she told the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy here, the leading international conference on new and resurgent diseases.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria have been around for almost as long as there have been antibiotics. Until recently, researchers have been able to outwit them by developing new antibiotics. Now, however, the pipeline of new antibiotics has slowed, and germs are coming perilously close to winning the race.

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Nearly 4 Million Fish Die In N.C. Waters

Reports of more dead fish on the Neuse River continue to come to waterway observers, increasing estimates from of a fish kill that began as 8,000 fish on Thursday to as many as 4 million.

Larry Baldwin, lower Neuse Riverkeeper for the Neuse Riverkeeper Foundation, said reports of additional dead fish have continued to come from people located several miles upriver from New Bern to areas as far as southeast as Clubfoot Creek. This “gives a very conservative estimate of at least 4 million dead fish over the last four days,” Baldwin said.

The main species involved is Atlantic Menhaden, an anatropous species or one that moves into rivers from the ocean to breed and one that is very important for the river and the U.S. coast, he said.

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