1 Week, 7 Stories #42
Medical and military advances come at a cost. One we should pay, the other not so much.
Every edition features 7 stories, from the past week. I’ll draw on my background in media, journalism, agriculture, biotech, and renewable energy to come up with an interesting selection and to offer some context.
This week marked the anniversary of the start of WWII in 1939. We’re still looking for new and improved ways to wage war and that is where we’ll start of this edition.
According to an exclusive report from Reuters, launch sites for the Russian 9M370 Burevestnik missile have been identified in the area of Vologda about 400 km from Moscow. NATO is obviously a fan of James Bond and calls the missile SSC-X-9 Skyfall. Either way, it is a weapon with a range of 23,000 km (15,000 miles) but do you really care what it might be called when a nuclear warhead tipped spewing out radioactive exhaust is bearing down on you?
Countries don’t like to discuss military technology over a beer so most of what is known about the guided missile is either informed speculation, leaked information, or good old-fashioned spying (A Russian scientist was jailed this week for after being convicted of passing missile secrets to China). There seems to be little doubt that the Burevestnik has a small sized nuclear power plant which gives it greater range and ‘loiter time’ which means it can hang around looking for the exact target before it strikes.
In 2023 President Vladimir Putin announced the completion of a final successful test of what he described as a “global-range nuclear-powered cruise missile”. At the time Western experts did not think the missile was operational nor did they agree with the Soviet claim the weapon was “invincible”. The Reuters report however would seem to indicate that Burevestnik is operational and given its launch locations, the Russian military must believe it can travel fast and far.
Not to be left out of the arms race, an Air & Space Forces Magazine report in August said that the United States and Australia were making “significant progress” on a hypersonic missile. It is reported to travel five times the speed of sound after being launched from an aircraft. Missiles that are fast and highly maneuverable are the dream machine for countries intent on waging wars. That does not narrow the field much, but the US, Russia, and China are the foremost leaders in the expensive, high-tech, move fast, kill quick, weapons race. The Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation somewhat off-handedly says that hypersonic weapons have been around for some time and are “merely something that travels at Mach-5 or faster”.
The difference with the latest generation is that instead of following a parabolic course (blast off and follow a U-shaped curve before hitting its target) these missiles are more maneuverable, leave the confines of the earth’s atmosphere, and re-enter still able to evade defences. In particular says the Centre, they can get past “terminal-phase defences” (the last chance to intercept and destroy the missile).
As the Friendly Giant used to say on TV when many of us were younger, “Look up, look w-a-a-a-a-y up”.
And now for a completely different aspect of warfare.
A Russian ‘spy whale’ was found dead off the Norwegian coast this week. Nicknamed Hvaldimir, he was first noticed five years ago wearing a GoPro camera attached to a harness that read “Equipment of St Petersburg”. No cause of death was apparent and there will be a necropsy performed. Apart from the question of labelling your beluga whale as coming from Russia, the idea of putting mammals to work for the military is not new.
While attending a conference in San Diego year ago, I was sitting on an out of the way dock having something to drink when a navy pontoon boat pulled in. Following along was a pair of dolphins obviously familiar with the routine. They were not penned in or tethered in any way but responded to the commands of the team and got their fair share of fish as a reward. When the pontoon boat left, the dolphins followed.
As far back as 1960 dolphins and beluga whales were trained and deployed to detect or retrieve objects underwater, deliver equipment to divers, and perform underwater surveillance with a camera either attached or carried by the marine mammals. Never short of military acronyms they were part of the ABWS (Advanced Biological Weapon System) and if one “system” died or was killed in action it was replaced by another “system” according to the Dolphin Project. The U.S Department of Defense says the Marine Mammal Program contributes to national security.
We have been using animals in the military for as long as there have been wars. Horses of course were put to use for transport, to carry fighters into pitched battle, and have been glorified for their heroic actions in battles as faithful unto death.
Going back to 1870, homing pigeons were used to carry messages during the Franco-Prussian war and in the First World War carried not only messages but a small camera. One pigeon named Cher Ami flew 12 successful missions and is credited with saving the ‘Lost Battalion’ in the Argonne Forest even after being badly wounded. He was awarded the French Croix de Guerre and eventually died from his wounds.
The list of animals used in wars could go on with stories of dogs, elephants, camels, donkey, mules, and cats who did their jobs and collected accolades.
However, to go back to the Dolphin Project and its founder Ric O’Barry:
“Animals are apolitical and should not be drafted into military service or deliberately put in danger during a human conflict.”
Avian flu is on the move in the United States. New numbers this week show that it has been reported in 194 dairy facilities in 14 states. There have also been positive tests in cats and alpacas. So far there are 14 confirmed cases in people in the US.
With much of the spread happening around dairy herds the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has authorized field trials of a vaccine to be used on dairy cattle.
The current strain of avian flu is H5N1 (clade 2.3.4.4b to be more precise) , and it is a fickle little bug. It has forced producers into culling millions of domestic poultry around the world and made farm workers sick. Ducks and geese kicked off the spread and though they are still a prime natural source of infection it easily spread to domestic birds. It has been in circulation since the 1880s, but it wasn’t until 1959 that the first case of H5N1 was isolated and categorized. In 2003 it started making its way into the human population and according to the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, it was someone from Alberta who was the first confirmed death from H5N1 in North America. That was in 2014 and at the time officials believed that spread to people could be contained and they have proved to be right in that prediction. In 2024 it moved into dairy cows and apparently jumped back into the wild bird population. The USDA has an up-to-date dashboard showing cases in other mammals and it ranges from skunks to bears to squirrels, and to seals. I said it was fickle!
The virus is killed by pasteurization and there have been no confirmed cases of it appearing in our food chain. As I have written before however, if you are one of those people who haunts the streets looking for unpasteurized milk for sale, you are rolling the dice on whether or not you will be the latest best friend for H5N1.
H5N1 is not a risk to the general public so there are few vaccines available to protect humans. However your seasonal flu shot can still help in reducing transmission according to this story from The Conversation. The human flu vaccine reduces the risk of a human/avian flu recombinant strain developing.
Meanwhile work on development and approval of a vaccine for cattle will go a long way to control this latest outbreak.
We have lab grown meat, milk products made in a lab, even leather made through the wonders of chemistry, so cotton made in the lab was probably just a matter of time. Fashion brands have talked about the future of their industry as being cooked up in a lab for a few years, and Scientific American reported on a lab-grown cotton study in September of 2000.
Growing cotton uses 2.5% of the worlds arable land, and the process to turn balls of cotton into a fabric takes about 20,000 litres (5200 gallons) of water to make just 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of cotton. That is not exactly sustainable agriculture.
Galy is a Boston start-up which aims to get around all that resource intensive production. It has secured $33 million USd in funding and has deals with some interesting buyers including Suzuran Medical which last year agreed to use Galy’s lab-grown cotton in its surgical cotton products.
Bloomberg News says that Galy has only been able to make a few kilograms of vat-grown cotton, so the Suzuran deal is contingent on it scaling up production. That will not be easy. This report from SynBioBeta points out that “Even on a small scale, it is a very tedious and time-consuming process. Growing cotton in the lab at an industrial scale is not realistic at this time. The cost will be at least 10 to 20 times higher than traditional cotton”.
Galy has no shortage of high profile investors including Bill Gates and Sam Altman and as you’ll hear in this podcast from Harvard Business School, the CEO of Galy is not shy about talking up the technology and offering his vision for greener agriculture, including his cotton.
Lab grown meat is still struggling to turn a profit after a decade of commercialization and right now bioreactor cotton is not much more than a proof of concept. Clearly some investors are bullish on lab-grown cotton, but you will need to be patient while waiting for your next t-shirt to have a ‘Made in a Vat’ label.
Canadian researchers have been able to detect awareness in a comatose patient who was considered “clinically unresponsive”. The results of the work led by researchers at Western University and the Lawson Health Research Institute was published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. They were able to spot the brain activity thanks to a new portable brain imaging technique they developed called near infrared spectroscopy.
When the outwardly unresponsive patient was asked to imagine playing tennis, the part of the brain that imagines movement, showed a significant response.
A coma can generally be described as an unresponsive state where no external stimuli will wake the patient. Depending on their condition they may or may not require full life support. The coma may last only a few weeks or in the case of Canadian Annie Shapiro, 29 years. After a heart attack and stroke in 1963 she fell into a coma and awoke in 1992. The 1998 TV movie Forever Love was based (loosely) on her story. Annie died in 2003.
The results of the Canadian research will help in the care of coma patients and will help families decide on the level of care to provide for a patient showing no signs of awareness.
With tremendous breakthroughs in genomics there are 20 gene therapies approved in the United States and about half that number in Canada. These cell and gene therapies (CGT) cover a range of diseases and conditions ranging from types of lymphomas, leukemia, hemophilia, sickle cell disease, and muscle conditions.
There are also a number of rare diseases that cannot be managed or cured with gene therapies, but new drugs offer hope to patients. When Canada embarked on the development of a rare disease strategy there were 93 drugs approved for rare diseases.
Medical care for rare and genetic diseases does not come cheap.
All of those 93 rare disease drugs cost between $100,000 and 200,000 Cdn per patient per year. CGT can run in the millions per treatment.
According to a BNN Bloomberg story this week, employers and insurance companies do not want to pay those costs and patients are turning to public fundraising to get treatment. With provincial health plans and company health plans, the situation is slightly different in Canada, but the problem remains. British Columbia’s PharmaCare for instance, handles these expensive treatments on a case-by-case basis. Alberta’s Blue Cross has some rare disease drugs pre-approved, but the Minister responsible for healthcare makes the final decision. A report from SunLife estimated that in 2020, the total spend by private plans on rare disease drugs alone was approximately $650 million in Canada. That is not sustainable for health care systems.
A case in point is Pfizer’s gene therapy Beqvez. It was approved in Canada in January for the treatment of Hempohilia B. In March, the Canadian Journal of Health Technologies recommended it for reimbursement for treatment of patients 18 years or older. Though I was able to find that private insurer Desjardins does not cover the cost of the treatment, it appears that it becomes one of those case-by-case decisions for the one-time $3.5 million cost. The media leapt on the announcement of the approval, but never followed up on where it would be available or who would ever receive the treatment.
There seems to be a disconnect between the drug R & D pipeline, the drug approval process, and the reimbursement decisions by private and public insurers.
GoFundMe is not the answer.
When our news media required a print subscription or was behind a paywall when it became digital, we at least knew that time and effort had been put into its creation. There was also the opportunity for consumers to simply stop buying bad information.
We are now up to our neck in information, much of it free and fed to us by an algorithm. Some good, some bad, some true, some blatantly false, and some that treads a fine line between mis- and dis- information. Thanks to the development of Photoshop in 1988 and now increasingly sophisticated AI generated content it is often difficult to even tell the difference between what is real and what is not. And in the worst of all possible scenarios, we are reaching the point where we do not trust anything we see or hear if it does not fit our own world view.
Turning this media monster around may well be impossible but as University of Calgary assistant professor Catherine Burwell says in this UCalgary News article, putting more emphasis on media literacy in schools is still an urgent need.
Trent University’s student newspaper Arthur, says media literacy starts with the “stuff you learn in English class” and extends into analyzing specific aspects of media and critically thinking about the media we consume. The article suggests media literacy is not dead but does admit it is not totally alive either. And that is coming from a generation that has grown up surrounded by a fast-changing media sector.
Recent decisions by school boards to ban cellphones in class does not help the problem either. The Winnipeg Free Press says it does nothing to teach media and literacy skills – its just solves a classroom attention problem. We need to get past that superficial fix and teach school kids (and their parents) how to identify quality news. The Canadian not-for-profit organization MediaSmarts offers a solid outline to help teachers get the job done.
We also need to start helping kids learn what media is and how it fits into every aspect of their lives.
This 10-minute video report from Al Jazeera earlier this year shows how Finland has addressed the challenge. We could learn a lot from them.
Read, comment, subscribe, and share this newsletter.
I’m available for contract and freelance work with not-for-profits and charities. With 40 years of experience behind me and lots of time ahead of me, I’m here to help you make a difference in your media relations, public relations, and general communications needs.