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Famous Doctors: History of Quarantine Quarantine
On July 1, 1946, the Communicable Disease Center (CDC) settled . . . sixth floor of the Volunteer Building on Peachtree Street in Atlanta, Georgia. Its primary mission was simple yet highly challenging: field investigation, training, and control of communicable diseases.Today, CDC is known as the nation's premiere health promotion, prevention, and preparedness agencies.
CDC is globally recognized for conducting research and investigations and for its action-oriented approach. CDC applies research and findings to improve people′s daily lives and responds to health emergencies—something that distinguishes CDC from its peer agencies.
CDC works with states and other partners to provide a system of health surveillance to monitor and prevent disease outbreaks (including bioterrorism), implement disease prevention strategies, and maintain national health statistics. CDC also guards against international disease transmission, with personnel stationed in more than 50 countries.
From Inspection to Intervention
After evaluating the quarantine program and its role in preventing disease transmission, CDC trimmed the program in the 1970s and changed its focus from routine inspection to program management and intervention. The new focus included an enhanced surveillance system to monitor the onset of epidemics abroad and a modernized inspection process to meet the changing needs of international traffic.
By 1995, all U.S. ports of entry were covered by only seven quarantine stations. A station was added in 1996 in Atlanta, Georgia, just before the city hosted the 1996 Summer Olympic Games. Following the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic of 2003, CDC reorganized the quarantine station system, expanding to 18 stations with more than 90 field employees.
Quarantine Now
The Division of Global Migration and Quarantine is part of CDC's National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases and is headquartered in Atlanta. Quarantine stations are located in Anchorage, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, El Paso, Honolulu, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, San Juan, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. (see contact lists and map(https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/quarantinestationcontactlistfull.html)).
Under its delegated authority, the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine is empowered to detain, medically examine, or conditionally release individuals and wildlife suspected of carrying a communicable disease.
Source: cdc.gov
CDC is globally recognized for conducting research and investigations and for its action-oriented approach. CDC applies research and findings to improve people′s daily lives and responds to health emergencies—something that distinguishes CDC from its peer agencies.
CDC works with states and other partners to provide a system of health surveillance to monitor and prevent disease outbreaks (including bioterrorism), implement disease prevention strategies, and maintain national health statistics. CDC also guards against international disease transmission, with personnel stationed in more than 50 countries.
From Inspection to Intervention
After evaluating the quarantine program and its role in preventing disease transmission, CDC trimmed the program in the 1970s and changed its focus from routine inspection to program management and intervention. The new focus included an enhanced surveillance system to monitor the onset of epidemics abroad and a modernized inspection process to meet the changing needs of international traffic.
By 1995, all U.S. ports of entry were covered by only seven quarantine stations. A station was added in 1996 in Atlanta, Georgia, just before the city hosted the 1996 Summer Olympic Games. Following the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic of 2003, CDC reorganized the quarantine station system, expanding to 18 stations with more than 90 field employees.
Quarantine Now
The Division of Global Migration and Quarantine is part of CDC's National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases and is headquartered in Atlanta. Quarantine stations are located in Anchorage, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, El Paso, Honolulu, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, Newark, Philadelphia, San Diego, San Francisco, San Juan, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. (see contact lists and map(https://www.cdc.gov/quarantine/quarantinestationcontactlistfull.html)).
Under its delegated authority, the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine is empowered to detain, medically examine, or conditionally release individuals and wildlife suspected of carrying a communicable disease.
Source: cdc.gov
Medicine:A New App Could Help You Get Cheaper Medicine
Amid an ongoing national debate over high drug prices, Blink Health hopes to drastically reduce what people pay for generic prescription medications.
The startup, which lets people compare cheap drug prices online, order prescriptions and pick them up from a local pharmacy, was previously a private service with a limited number of customers. On Wednesday, Blink launched a public website and mobile app, opening it up to anyone with an Internet connection or smartphone.
“Our mission,” Blink co-founder Geoffrey Chaiken told The Huffington Post, “is to make medication inexpensive, clearly priced and easy to purchase.” Chaiken started the company in 2014 with his brother, Matthew.
While drug companies tend to reserve their lowest rates for big employers and insurance companies, Blink negotiates similarly low rates by grouping its users’ purchases to make the company look like a large drug buying organization, Geoffrey Chaiken told HuffPost.
“Using the power of Internet to aggregate,” he said, “when we negotiate, we look to pharmacies like we’re 25 million people.” He declined, however, to disclose the total number of people who use Blink.
The New York Times, which also interviewed the Blink co-founders this week, noted that price comparison site GoodRx already lets people shop around for cheap medications. What makes Blink unique, according to its founders, is that it lets the user choose from 60,000 pharmacy locations where prescriptions can be picked up — it doesn’t tell them which pharmacy they must go to.
The Chaiken brothers also claim the site offers prices much lower than what most people pay at pharmacies, noting that half the drugs on Blink cost $10 or less, and 40 percent cost $5 or less.
Due in part to rising costs, 20 to 30 percent of prescriptions are never filled, according to the Food and Drug Administration. Indeed, prescription drug prices jumped by more than 10 percent in 2015, per Truveris, a health care data company. That same year, former Turing Pharmaceuticals CEO Martin Shkreli became the face of the issue after hiking the price of Daraprim, a pill used to treat HIV/AIDS and cancer patients, by more than 5,000 percent.
One factor that has kept drug prices high is that most patients don’t know what their drugs ought to cost and end up paying more than they should, the Chaiken brothers told HuffPost. They think their company can help people while turning a profit.
Blink doesn’t charge patients to use the service, but the company takes a cut from every transaction that saves a patient money.
“If someone’s paying $15 for a drug, we negotiate something south of that and take a small percentage of savings as revenue,” Geoffrey Chaiken said. “We rely on a making thin margins on a lot of volume.”
The Chaikens also said that patients can use Blink whether or not they have medical insurance. (Insured patients should just make sure to compare the Blink price with their copay.)
Source: huffingtonpost.com
Scientific Inventions: GPS.gov: Agricultural Applications
The development and implementation of precision agriculture or site-specific farming has been made possible by combining the Global Positioning System (GPS) and geographic information systems (GIS). These technologies enable the coupling of real-time data collection with accurate position information, leading to the efficient manipulation and analysis of large amounts of geospatial data. GPS-based applications in precision farming are being used for farm planning, field mapping, soil sampling, tractor guidance, crop scouting, variable rate applications, and yield mapping. GPS allows farmers to work during low visibility field conditions such as rain, dust, fog, and darkness.
In the past, it was difficult for farmers to correlate production techniques and crop yields with land variability. This limited their ability to develop the most effective soil/plant treatment strategies that could have enhanced their production. Today, more precise application of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, and better control of the dispersion of those chemicals are possible through precision agriculture, thus reducing expenses, producing a higher yield, and creating a more environmentally friendly farm.
Precision agriculture is now changing the way farmers and agribusinesses view the land from which they reap their profits. Precision agriculture is about collecting timely geospatial information on soil-plant-animal requirements and prescribing and applying site-specific treatments to increase agricultural production and protect the environment. Where farmers may have once treated their fields uniformly, they are now seeing benefits from micromanaging their fields. Precision agriculture is gaining in popularity largely due to the introduction of high technology tools into the agricultural community that are more accurate, cost effective, and user friendly. Many of the new innovations rely on the integration of on-board computers, data collection sensors, and GPS time and position reference systems.
Many believe that the benefits of precision agriculture can only be realized on large farms with huge capital investments and experience with information technologies. Such is not the case. There are inexpensive and easy-to-use methods and techniques that can be developed for use by all farmers. Through the use of GPS, GIS, and remote sensing, information needed for improving land and water use can be collected. Farmers can achieve additional benefits by combining better utilization of fertilizers and other soil amendments, determining the economic threshold for treating pest and weed infestations, and protecting the natural resources for future use.
GPS equipment manufacturers have developed several tools to help farmers and agribusinesses become more productive and efficient in their precision farming activities. Today, many farmers use GPS-derived products to enhance operations in their farming businesses. Location information is collected by GPS receivers for mapping field boundaries, roads, irrigation systems, and problem areas in crops such as weeds or disease. The accuracy of GPS allows farmers to create farm maps with precise acreage for field areas, road locations and distances between points of interest. GPS allows farmers to accurately navigate to specific locations in the field, year after year, to collect soil samples or monitor crop conditions. Crop advisors use rugged data collection devices with GPS for accurate positioning to map pest, insect, and weed infestations in the field. Pest problem areas in crops can be pinpointed and mapped for future management decisions and input recommendations. The same field data can also be used by aircraft sprayers, enabling accurate swathing of fields without use of human “flaggers” to guide them. Crop dusters equipped with GPS are able to fly accurate swaths over the field, applying chemicals only where needed, minimizing chemical drift, reducing the amount of chemicals needed, thereby benefiting the environment. GPS also allows pilots to provide farmers with accurate maps..
Source: gps.gov
ART: Sultan Sooud Al‑Qassemi knows media. Changing the Narrative.
When the Arab Spring started sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa, Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi became a go-to source for live updates on social media. An occasional columnist with 375,000 followers on Twitter, he is now a public figure and activist. Art has become his big agenda.
Eventually, he explains, his interest in breaking news had died down and he shifted his attention to collecting and promoting modern and contemporary art from the Arab world. He sees it as a continuation of the ideals of the Arab Spring, he says, because the art tends to be political — and it defies traditional definitions set by the West.
Qassemi actively promotes the Barjeel Art Foundation, which he founded in 2010. It contains more than 1,000 works of art that he has collected. He has buying power because he also happens to be a member of one of the ruling families of the United Arab Emirates — though he’d rather talk about art than his family history.
He stopped by NPR’s New York City bureau to do that.
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Eventually, he explains, his interest in breaking news had died down and he shifted his attention to collecting and promoting modern and contemporary art from the Arab world. He sees it as a continuation of the ideals of the Arab Spring, he says, because the art tends to be political — and it defies traditional definitions set by the West.
Qassemi actively promotes the Barjeel Art Foundation, which he founded in 2010. It contains more than 1,000 works of art that he has collected. He has buying power because he also happens to be a member of one of the ruling families of the United Arab Emirates — though he’d rather talk about art than his family history.
He stopped by NPR’s New York City bureau to do that.
Click on the Button to continue on:
Islamic Literature and modern day interpretations
Read through the excerpt of Aladdin from “The Thousand and One Nights” and compare this story to Disney’s version of Aladdin.
Disney versionAfter a swooping view of flaming sunset dunes, the elegant sultan’s palace, and an Arabian village on a deep blue night, we are introduced to our narrator. He informs us we are in Agrabah, somewhere in the Middle East, and that he has the best damn merchandise money can buy. He presents the audience with various pieces of junk, but when the camera starts to wander away he tries to grab our attention by showcasing a special oil lamp.
He warns us not to be fooled by appearances, and that this particular lamp changed the course of a young man’s life. In probably the most entertaining sales pitch ever, he proceeds to tell us the tale of the lamp, but since he is never seen again, we can assume that he never actually closed the deal.
The story begins with Jafar trying to gain access to the Cave of Wonders so he can procure the lamp. He sends a thief in to collect it, who is promptly chomped by the cave entrance – only one person can enter the cave, and this person happens to be Aladdin. Using his dark magic, Jafar finds out who he is and has him thrown in the dungeon, and then in the guise of an old prisoner convinces him to help obtain the lamp. Aladdin enters the cave and finds it, but Abu gets over-excited and touches some of the forbidden treasure, causing the cave to collapse and melt into lava. Fortunately, on their way inside they befriended a magic carpet who whisks them to safety, well most of the way anyway.
Aladdin is a street-wise orphan who has to steal to survive in the streets of Agrabah, together with Abu, his trusty monkey. As well as being one of the few Disney princes who doesn’t look like a department store mannequin, he has a strong sense of morality (despite thieving) and somehow manages to keep his fez perched snugly on his head at all times.
Princess Jasmine is the headstrong daughter of the sultan, “headstrong” meaning she won’t just marry any old suitor who struts through the gates of the palace. By law she has to choose and marry a prince in three days’ time, but she only wants to marry for love, and so ends up rejecting every showboating prince she meets with the help of her loyal tiger, Raja. She also dreams of escaping to a life outside the palace walls.
AStronomy: Modern Day Frontiers: Space
Modern day technology has now allowed travel beyond earth into new frontiers like space and even possibly Mars. Go to: https://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/living-in-space/index.html and click on the “living in space” tab on the left then click on the “Into the harshest frontier” article.
Then go to http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/10/tech/innovation/mars-one-plan/index.html and watch the video on a Dutch company taking applications for people to get a one-way ticket to live on Mars leaving in 2025. Would you go?
Then go to http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/10/tech/innovation/mars-one-plan/index.html and watch the video on a Dutch company taking applications for people to get a one-way ticket to live on Mars leaving in 2025. Would you go?