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Cites

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1		-Nuclear power is key to South Africa being able to meet its growing energy demands and prevent grid collapse—renewables may be good, but you should still prefer a middle of the road approach—nuclear must be a part of that
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3		-Njoroge 16: Ronald Njoroge. April 24, 2016. "Africa turning to nuclear to meet growing energy needs". http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2016-04/24/c'135307733.htm. RW
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5		-NAIROBI, April 24 (Xinhua) — The UN nuclear agency said on Friday that African countries are expressing greater interest in tapping nuclear power for their energy needs. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Deputy Director General Mikhail Chudakov told Xinhua in Nairobi that over 30 Africa states are considering introducing nuclear power in the medium to long term. "We have already conducted Integrated Nuclear Infrastructure Review (INIR) missions in Morocco, Nigeria Kenya and South Africa," Chudakov said. INIR missions are conducted by IAEA at the request of nations that require assistance in developing or expanding nuclear power. IAEA is also expected toconduct an INIR mission in Ghana next year. South Africa is the only African country that has nuclear plants for electricity generation. The African nation has two nuclear power plants each producing 980MW. Chudakov said that South Africa plans to add nine Gigawatts of nuclear power in the next 10 to 15 years while Kenya also plans to commission four Gigawatts by the year 2030. He added that Egypt has already signed an agreement with Russia to develop nuclear power. The IAEA official said that developing countries such as those in Africa need to expand their electricity production as a result of growing demand. "Increasing populations and expanding economic growth is fueling demand for additional power," he said. Chudakov noted that nuclear power offers an alternative source of energy because it is relatively cheap and reliable. "Africa should join the club of developed countries that have use nuclear energy to meet electricity needs for their industries and households," he said. Deputy Director noted that nuclear power is ideal for African countries because it has minimum impact on climate change. "However, each African state will have to make a decision on whether to adopt nuclear energy as part of its energy mix," he said. Chudakov added that wind and solar powered electricity is good for Africa but it has disadvantages because it fluctuates a lot. "So for the base load nuclear energy is preferable because it produces steady electricity," he said.
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7		-Grid collapse will happen if South Africa doesn’t ramp up energy production
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9		-Magdaleno 15: Johnny Magdaleno. February 9, 2015. Vice News. "South Africa’s power grid is on the brink of collapse". https://news.vice.com/article/south-africas-power-grid-is-on-the-brink-of-collapse. RW
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11		-South Africa is on high alert as a surge of power plant maintenance issues have led to a spike in enforced black-outs throughout the country, temporarily depriving millions of electricity and raising criticism of the government's failure to address a longstanding need for more energy infrastructure. Eskom, the government-owned electricity company which supplies 95 percent of South Africa's electricity and 45 percent of electricity used by the African continent, has admitted that it is currently facing a "risk of collapse of its entire power network." If that happened, South Africa and portions of surrounding countries could be submerged in darkness for upwards of two weeks. The country's energy woes began in 2007, after the demand for energy by burgeoning industries like platinum and gold mining caught up with the country's decades-old power infrastructure and led to a series of uncontrolled blackouts. But last November a coal silo collapsed at an Eskom power facility that contributes 10 percent of South Africa's energy and caused the site to lose 1,800 megawatts of its energy capacity. month seems to be the more turbulent in history. "Yesterday and today, power was out from 10.30 to 2.30," Ronak Gopaldas, head of the country risk department at Rand Merchant Bank, told VICE News. He has lived in South Africa his whole life. "If it's now and then, we tend to turn a blind eye and get over it. But now that it's becoming a normal feature, people are increasingly irritated," Gopaldas added. South Africa is capable of producing more than 40,000 megawatts of energy, making it Africa's biggest electricity producer ahead of Egypt, which is capable of producing 29,000 megawatts. But due to critical defects in energy infrastructure and delays in constructing new power plants, Eksom has only been able to supply 65 percent of its total capacity in recent days, according to local media. Some new power plants, like the Medupi and Kusile facilities, are still only unfinished skeletons years after their planned completion dates. As of February 8, parts of South Africa had experienced gaps in electricity availability for six consecutive days, offering a contradictory reality to Eskom's statement that this year's surge is less severe than when the energy crisis first hit in 2008, and the utility was forced to load shed for multiple days on end. South Africa's national treasury announced in late January it would begin selling off assets to meet Eskom's goal of raising $22 billion to refurbish its decrepit systems and build enough power infrastructure to meet current demand. The first capital injection from these sales will not take place until the end of June 2015, however, and at an estimated $870 million it is a mere fraction of the capital required to pull South Africa's energy supply out of the hole. Eskom estimates that because of this the country will likely be without stable power until 2018. Political bodies have reportedly begun establishing emergency plans in the case of a total power grid collapse. South African President Jacob Zuma's office, for example, would relocate the president to an undisclosed location and install soldiers at national banks and government institutions. The US embassy has also announced it is evaluating its contingency options, although a US spokesperson deflated concerns by noting that every embassy worldwide has a contingency plan within reach. South Africa's industries, the largest of which is mining, are some of the most affected by long-term power issues. During the 2008 crisis South Africa's platinum mines, which contribute approximately 78 percent of the worlds circulating platinum supply, were forced to shut down their operations. This led to a spike in global platinum costs and even a devaluation of the South African rand. The recent increase in load shedding is likely to be a focal point of discussion during Mining Indaba, an annual gathering of Africa's mining industry leaders scheduled to start on February 9 in Cape Town, South Africa. Small-scale entrepreneurs are also suffering. While most larger companies are able to supplement their open hours with generators, others cannot afford to buy auxiliary power sources at a time when profits are being undercut by sporadic business closures. "Last Friday we were supposed to deliver some clothes to a client, but we weren't able to finish because from 10.00am to 2.00pm there wasn't any electricity," Vuyokazi Ngalo, a fashion designer who runs a small operation of six employees and a few sewing machines in a Johannesburg township, told VICE News. "We had to reschedule to work Saturday and Sunday, but even Sunday there was another power outage for five hours." "I can't purchase a generator, but we also can't keep waiting for power to become stable," she said. "It has only been in the past month that we cannot meet our deadlines." Ngalo's business has been operating since 2010. Ngalo also noted that South African townships, which have long been host to the country's lower socio-economic populations, are less affected by load shedding because electricity demand from those areas places significantly less pressure on the national grid than major business and industry regions. Anthony Kouderis, who helps create energy plans for Ngalo and other under-resourced South African entrepreneurs through the Awethu Project, says that in past years Eskom's load shedding schedules were hard to plan around because they were consistently inaccurate. "Sometimes electricity cuts would be announced and then nothing would happen, or it would happen without being announced," he told VICE News. "This has a dramatic affect on the businesses because they can't adapt." Schedules this year are more reliable because of growing press attention towards the crisis, he notes. But as electricity cuts continue to prevent businesses from operating on normal schedules, small companies are highly endangered.
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13		-That causes instability—nuclear power is key
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15		-AFP 15: AFP. January 11, 2015.Daily Mail. Looming power blackouts threaten south africas economy. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-2905524/Looming-power-blackouts-threaten-South-Africas-economy.html. RW
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17		-In November, Eskom had to introduce power cuts across the country to prevent a collapse of the grid after a coal storage silo collapsed. The outages escalated in December when swathes of the economic hub of Johannesburg were repeatedly plunged into darkness. Eskom, which relies on its ageing coal stations for supply, has warned of a high risk of more "load shedding" until March at least. But analysts predict that the blackouts could continue for two more years until new power plants come on stream. That would be bad news for South Africa as one of the BRICS group of emerging economies considered to have huge potential, along with Brazil, Russia, India and China. Last year's outages cost companies millions of dollars in lost production and business and battered South Africa's already-struggling economy, which was expected to grow by 1.4 percent in 2014. Growth is forecast to rise to 2.5 percent this year, but that is still well below South Africa's potential, and the impact of power cuts will be more widespread this year. "This year it's a different situation. It's negatively affecting the retail sector, it's much more across the board and it's much more immediate," said Dennis Dykes, chief economist at Nedbank. "Unfortunately it certainly has the potential of hurting growth, anything between half a percent to one percent of GDP," said Dykes. "It is a real constraint on the economy." - Vicious cycle of breakdowns - Senior Eskom spokesman Andrew Etzinger summed up the situation: "The grid is tight, and we are vulnerable." "There is a medium risk of load-shedding on the grid at the moment and that will continue until the end of summer (March)," he added. In an effort to help slash usage, Eskom has posted energy conservation tips on its Twitter account. "Open windows and doors to allow a cool breeze to circulate through the house" instead of turning on the air conditioning, says one tweet. "Only boil the amount of water in your kettle that you need for the number of cups of tea or coffee you are making," reads another. The news of more blackouts comes after Eskom said the launch of a new power unit will be delayed until February, one of a series of missed deadlines that has exacerbated the shortfall. The power company has embarked on massive schemes to build three coal-fired stations which will see the country's generation and transmission capacity grow by 17,000 megawatts from the current 40,000 MW. South Africa already has one nuclear power station and the government has also announced plans to build eight nuclear reactors worth up to $50 billion to add 9,600 megawatts of generating capacity. To avoid outages, Eskom has been deferring maintenance on its old fleet of power stations, leading to a vicious cycle of breakdowns. "It's like when you have a car and you don't service it, eventually it will fail and this is what is happening," said energy analyst Chris Yelland. "You cannot keep the lights on at any cost forever," he said, predicting that South Africa will experience load shedding for at least the next two years while it waits for new power stations to come on stream and join the grid. "You've got to balance the need to keep the lights on with the need to do proper maintenance, which means load shedding," he said.
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20		-====African stability solves multiple zoonotic diseases ====
21		-**Aluwong**, lecturer in department of veterinary public health and preventive medicine at Ahmadu Bello University, **2010**
22		-("Emerging diseases and implications for Millennium Development Goals in Africa by 2015 – an overview," Veterinaria Italiana, 46 (2), http://www.te.izs.it/vet'italiana/2010/46'2/137.pdf)
23		-Emerging diseases can occur anywhere in the world and the consequences can be severe. Based on experience to date, it is difficult to predict the origin or the nature of future emerging diseases. Recently, new emerging diseases have in some instances demonstrated that they originate primarily where there are high concentrations of different animal species, often in close contact with people (2). As human lifestyles change due to advancing technologies, increasing populations and changing social behaviour, new diseases emerge, while those that have been controlled in the past sometimes tend to re-emerge. Emerging diseases can be defined as infections that are new occurrences in a susceptible population or are rapidly increasing in incidence or geographic range (16). About 75 of the emerging diseases that have affected humans in the past 10 years are caused by pathogens originating from animals and/or their products (29). Approximately 60 of these diseases are zoonoses, including recent examples, such as H1N1 (commonly referred to as ‘swine flu’), avian influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Ebola haemorrhagic fever and probably human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS). Some of the most important factors that have contributed to an increase in emerging diseases are as follows: ▪ expansion of the human population ▪ climate change ▪ globalisation of trade ▪ increasing movement of animal species, civil unrest/wars, microbial evolution and ecological disruption (16). These and other current issues suggest that emerging diseases may not only continue to occur, but have the potential of increasing the rate of their emergence. These observations call for closer integration of veterinary, medical and environmental communities, along with relentless education of the general public and policy-makers on the African continent. Complexity of factors underlying infectious disease emergence Microbial evolution The emergence of some disease is due to the natural evolution of micro-organisms. For example, a new serotype of Vibrio cholerae, designated 0139, appears to be nearly identical to the strain that most commonly causes cholera epidemics, Vibrio cholerae 01, except that it has gained the ability to produce a capsule (8). The consequence of the new serotype is that even people who have immunity against the earlier strain are susceptible to the new one. Resistance to the effects of antimicrobial drugs is contributing to the re-emergence of many diseases, including malaria. ~~CONTINUES… full article available… typing out the entire PDF is a nightmare…~~ The principal Millennium Development Goal that interfaces with emerging diseases is Millennium Development Goal No. 6, which is combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases. These other diseases mentioned in the sixth goal of the Millennium Development Goals include emerging diseases. Ensuring environmental sustainability is another goal of the Millennium Development Goals that also interfaced with emerging diseases. This includes livestock and environmental issues, such as land, water, air, biodiversity and ecosystems. Therefore, the mitigation of emerging disease outbreaks in Africa could largely contribute to achieving the Millennium Development Goals in Africa by 2015. For, as the saying goes, 'a healthy population is a productive population'. When there is complete eradication of microbial infectious agents in Africa, other Millennium Development Goals such as the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, the reduction of child mortality, achieving universal primary education etc., will be reached. However, good governance and rule of law on the continent of Africa must be a pre-requisite for the attainment of the Millenium Development Goals by 2015. New and strategic areas for partnerships within the global ‘One Health’ movement should be scientifically explored in Africa. The lessons of the recent past have taught us to expect the reoccurrence of emerging infections at any time and/or any place. Therefore, there is an urgent need to strengthen research, investigation and disease control partnerships among animal health and public health experts. Emerging infectious diseases do not have boundaries, that is, they occur and can spread to other continents of the world. It is therefore pertinent to adopt a global collaborative agenda that focuses on the surveillance, prevention and control of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases of animal origin. This should include the following components: the areas of wildlife biology, ecology, virology, ▪ integrated research agenda food safety, food and animal production, ▪ interdisciplinary zoonotic disease research centres ▪ infrastructural development; work force development ▪ improved international coordination/cooper- ation and focus oriented. ~~CONTINUES… full article available… typing out the entire PDF is a nightmare…~~ The responses of OIE member countries to a questionnaire on emerging zoonoses overwhelmingly acknowledged the impact of emerging zoonoses and their likely continued resurgence (18). A large number of member countries reported that they had experienced incidents of emerging and re-emerging diseases, along with the emergence of antimicrobial-resistant pathogens, and noted the importance of strengthening and improving surveillance, research and training to ensure or to build the capacity to address these persistent threats. The mitigation of emerging diseases on the continent of Africa will help to attain the Millennium Development Goals but the entrenchment of good democracy and rule of law must be a ’sine qua non’ of the various governments of African countries. Another key point is the need for stronger partnerships with national and international animal and public health organisations, academic institutions, private practitioners in animal and public health and non-governmental organisations to meet the ensuing challenges. The OIE and the FAO must continue to be involved in their response to the needs of member countries and the changing demands and opportunities associated with emerging infections. Of paramount importance to this transformation will be the formation and strengthening of partnerships, mobilisation of resources and the development of a global intersectoral approach in tackling zoonotic threats.
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25		-**====The impact is extinction – zoonotic diseases take out generic defense====**
26		-**Quammen 12** David, award-winning science writer, long-time columnist for Outside magazine for fifteen years, with work in National Geographic, Harper's, Rolling Stone, the New York Times Book Review and other periodicals, 9/29, "Could the next big animal-to-human disease wipe us out?," The Guardian, pg. 29, Lexis
27		-Infectious disease is all around us. It's one of the basic processes that ecologists study, along with predation and competition. Predators are big beasts that eat their prey from outside. Pathogens (disease-causing agents, such as viruses) are small beasts that eat their prey from within. Although infectious disease can seem grisly and dreadful, under ordinary conditions, it's every bit as natural as what lions do to wildebeests and zebras. But conditions aren't always ordinary. Just as predators have their accustomed prey, so do pathogens. And just as a lion might occasionally depart from its normal behaviour - to kill a cow instead of a wildebeest, or a human instead of a zebra - so a pathogen can shift to a new target. Aberrations occur. When a pathogen leaps from an animal into a person, and succeeds in establishing itself as an infectious presence, sometimes causing illness or death, the result is a zoonosis. It's a mildly technical term, zoonosis, unfamiliar to most people, but it helps clarify the biological complexities behind the ominous headlines about swine flu, bird flu, Sars, emerging diseases in general, and the threat of a global pandemic. It's a word of the future, destined for heavy use in the 21st century. Ebola and Marburg are zoonoses. So is bubonic plague. So was the so-called Spanish influenza of 1918-1919, which had its source in a wild aquatic bird and emerged to kill as many as 50 million people. All of the human influenzas are zoonoses. As are monkeypox, bovine tuberculosis, Lyme disease, West Nile fever, rabies and a strange new affliction called Nipah encephalitis, which has killed pigs and pig farmers in Malaysia. Each of these zoonoses reflects the action of a pathogen that can "spillover", crossing into people from other animals. Aids is a disease of zoonotic origin caused by a virus that, having reached humans through a few accidental events in western and central Africa, now passes human-to-human. This form of interspecies leap is not rare; about 60 of all human infectious diseases currently known either cross routinely or have recently crossed between other animals and us. Some of those - notably rabies - are familiar, widespread and still horrendously lethal, killing humans by the thousands despite centuries of efforts at coping with their effects. Others are new and inexplicably sporadic, claiming a few victims or a few hundred, and then disappearing for years. Zoonotic pathogens can hide. The least conspicuous strategy is to lurk within what's called a reservoir host: a living organism that carries the pathogen while suffering little or no illness. When a disease seems to disappear between outbreaks, it's often still lingering nearby, within some reservoir host. A rodent? A bird? A butterfly? A bat? To reside undetected is probably easiest wherever biological diversity is high and the ecosystem is relatively undisturbed. The converse is also true: ecological disturbance causes diseases to emerge. Shake a tree and things fall out. Michelle Barnes is an energetic, late 40s-ish woman, an avid rock climber and cyclist. Her auburn hair, she told me cheerily, came from a bottle. It approximates the original colour, but the original is gone. In 2008, her hair started falling out; the rest went grey "pretty much overnight". This was among the lesser effects of a mystery illness that had nearly killed her during January that year, just after she'd returned from Uganda. Her story paralleled the one Jaap Taal had told me about Astrid, with several key differences - the main one being that Michelle Barnes was still alive. Michelle and her husband, Rick Taylor, had wanted to see mountain gorillas, too. Their guide had taken them through Maramagambo Forest and into Python Cave. They, too, had to clamber across those slippery boulders. As a rock climber, Barnes said, she tends to be very conscious of where she places her hands. No, she didn't touch any guano. No, she was not bumped by a bat. By late afternoon they were back, watching the sunset. It was Christmas evening 2007. They arrived home on New Year's Day. On 4 January, Barnes woke up feeling as if someone had driven a needle into her skull. She was achy all over, feverish. "And then, as the day went on, I started developing a rash across my stomach." The rash spread. "Over the next 48 hours, I just went down really fast." By the time Barnes turned up at a hospital in suburban Denver, she was dehydrated; her white blood count was imperceptible; her kidneys and liver had begun shutting down. An infectious disease specialist, Dr Norman K Fujita, arranged for her to be tested for a range of infections that might be contracted in Africa. All came back negative, including the test for Marburg. Gradually her body regained strength and her organs began to recover. After 12 days, she left hospital, still weak and anaemic, still undiagnosed. In March she saw Fujita on a follow-up visit and he had her serum tested again for Marburg. Again, negative. Three more months passed, and Barnes, now grey-haired, lacking her old energy, suffering abdominal pain, unable to focus, got an email from a journalist she and Taylor had met on the Uganda trip, who had just seen a news article. In the Netherlands, a woman had died of Marburg after a Ugandan holiday during which she had visited a cave full of bats. Barnes spent the next 24 hours Googling every article on the case she could find. Early the following Monday morning, she was back at Dr Fujita's door. He agreed to test her a third time for Marburg. This time a lab technician crosschecked the third sample, and then the first sample. The new results went to Fujita, who called Barnes: "You're now an honorary infectious disease doctor. You've self-diagnosed, and the Marburg test came back positive." The Marburg virus had reappeared in Uganda in 2007. It was a small outbreak, affecting four miners, one of whom died, working at a site called Kitaka Cave. But Joosten's death, and Barnes's diagnosis, implied a change in the potential scope of the situation. That local Ugandans were dying of Marburg was a severe concern - sufficient to bring a response team of scientists in haste. But if tourists, too, were involved, tripping in and out of some python-infested Marburg repository, unprotected, and then boarding their return flights to other continents, the place was not just a peril for Ugandan miners and their families. It was also an international threat. The first team of scientists had collected about 800 bats from Kitaka Cave for dissecting and sampling, and marked and released more than 1,000, using beaded collars coded with a number. That team, including scientist Brian Amman, had found live Marburg virus in five bats. Entering Python Cave after Joosten's death, another team of scientists, again including Amman, came across one of the beaded collars they had placed on captured bats three months earlier and 30 miles away. "It confirmed my suspicions that these bats are moving," Amman said - and moving not only through the forest but from one roosting site to another. Travel of individual bats between far-flung roosts implied circumstances whereby Marburg virus might ultimately be transmitted all across Africa, from one bat encampment to another. It voided the comforting assumption that this virus is strictly localised. And it highlighted the complementary question: why don't outbreaks of Marburg virus disease happen more often? Marburg is only one instance to which that question applies. Why not more Ebola? Why not more Sars? In the case of Sars, the scenario could have been very much worse. Apart from the 2003 outbreak and the aftershock cases in early 2004, it hasn't recurred. . . so far. Eight thousand cases are relatively few for such an explosive infection; 774 people died, not 7 million. Several factors contributed to limiting the scope and impact of the outbreak, of which humanity's good luck was only one. Another was the speed and excellence of the laboratory diagnostics - finding the virus and identifying it. Still another was the brisk efficiency with which cases were isolated, contacts were traced and quarantine measures were instituted, first in southern China, then in Hong Kong, Singapore, Hanoi and Toronto. If the virus had arrived in a different sort of big city - more loosely governed, full of poor people, lacking first-rate medical institutions - it might have burned through a much larger segment of humanity. One further factor, possibly the most crucial, was inherent in the way Sars affects the human body: symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, that person becomes highly infectious. That allowed many Sars cases to be recognised, hospitalised and placed in isolation before they hit their peak of infectivity. With influenza and many other diseases, the order is reversed. That probably helped account for the scale of worldwide misery and death during the 1918-1919 influenza. And that infamous global pandemic occurred in the era before globalisation. Everything nowadays moves around the planet faster, including viruses. When the Next Big One comes, it will likely conform to the same perverse pattern as the 1918 influenza: high infectivity preceding notable symptoms. That will help it move through cities and airports like an angel of death. The Next Big One is a subject that disease scientists around the world often address. The most recent big one is Aids, of which the eventual total bigness cannot even be predicted - about 30 million deaths, 34 million living people infected, and with no end in sight. Fortunately, not every virus goes airborne from one host to another. If HIV-1 could, you and I might already be dead. If the rabies virus could, it would be the most horrific pathogen on the planet. The influenzas are well adapted for airborne transmission, which is why a new strain can circle the world within days. The Sars virus travels this route, too, or anyway by the respiratory droplets of sneezes and coughs - hanging in the air of a hotel corridor, moving through the cabin of an aeroplane - and that capacity, combined with its case fatality rate of almost 10, is what made it so scary in 2003 to the people who understood it best. Human-to-human transmission is the crux. That capacity is what separates a bizarre, awful, localised, intermittent and mysterious disease (such as Ebola) from a global pandemic. Have you noticed the persistent, low-level buzz about avian influenza, the strain known as H5N1, among disease experts over the past 15 years? That's because avian flu worries them deeply, though it hasn't caused many human fatalities. Swine flu comes and goes periodically in the human population (as it came and went during 2009), sometimes causing a bad pandemic and sometimes (as in 2009) not so bad as expected; but avian flu resides in a different category of menacing possibility. It worries the flu scientists because they know that H5N1 influenza is extremely virulent in people, with a high lethality. As yet, there have been a relatively low number of cases, and it is poorly transmissible, so far, from human to human. It'll kill you if you catch it, very likely, but you're unlikely to catch it except by butchering an infected chicken. But if H5N1 mutates or reassembles itself in just the right way, if it adapts for human-to-human transmission, it could become the biggest and fastest killer disease since 1918. It got to Egypt in 2006 and has been especially problematic for that country. As of August 2011, there were 151 confirmed cases, of which 52 were fatal. That represents more than a quarter of all the world's known human cases of bird flu since H5N1 emerged in 1997. But here's a critical fact: those unfortunate Egyptian patients all seem to have acquired the virus directly from birds. This indicates that the virus hasn't yet found an efficient way to pass from one person to another. Two aspects of the situation are dangerous, according to biologist Robert Webster. The first is that Egypt, given its recent political upheavals, may be unable to staunch an outbreak of transmissible avian flu, if one occurs. His second concern is shared by influenza researchers and public health officials around the globe: with all that mutating, with all that contact between people and their infected birds, the virus could hit upon a genetic configuration making it highly transmissible among people. "As long as H5N1 is out there in the world," Webster told me, "there is the possibility of disaster. . . There is the theoretical possibility that it can acquire the ability to transmit human-to-human." He paused. "And then God help us." We're unique in the history of mammals. No other primate has ever weighed upon the planet to anything like the degree we do. In ecological terms, we are almost paradoxical: large-bodied and long-lived but grotesquely abundant. We are an outbreak. And here's the thing about outbreaks: they end. In some cases they end after many years, in others they end rather soon. In some cases they end gradually, in others they end with a crash. In certain cases, they end and recur and end again. Populations of tent caterpillars, for example, seem to rise steeply and fall sharply on a cycle of anywhere from five to 11 years. The crash endings are dramatic, and for a long while they seemed mysterious. What could account for such sudden and recurrent collapses? One possible factor is infectious disease, and viruses in particular.

EntryDate

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1		-2016-09-26 02:47:42.0

Judge

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1		-Martin Sigalow, Chris Theis, Daniel Shatzkin

Opponent

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1		-Harrison RP

ParentRound

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1		-2

Round

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1		-Octas

Team

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1		-Lexington Weiler Neg

Title

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1		-SEPTOCT- SA Energy DA

Tournament

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1		-Valley