Vaccines: Unnatural Selection

Whether or not to vaccinate children from infectious disease is a hotly debated topic.

Bordetella pertussis, the bacteria responsible for whooping cough.

I encountered a discussion where some parents discuss their choice not to vaccinate their kids. The author cites various factors justifying this choice; that vaccines may compromise the body's ability to fight infection, may cause an allergic reaction, or hinder the healthy development of the immune system; that the ingredients of many vaccines, among which may be chicken, monkey, and aborted human fetal cells, aluminum, and various others, are undesirable to have injected into the body; that there is insufficient research to justify the use of vaccines to prevent disease.

Child receiving an oral vaccine for polio.

Evolution is an ongoing process, and the evolution of the human race is in many ways insulated from the process of natural selection. Medical science has insulated sufferers of type 1 diabetes like myself from being selected out of the population by providing synthetic insulin, an artificial means to adapt to a challenge thrust onto me by circumstance. Without this development, I would be dead, and my unique genetic heritage obliterated.

Similarly, vaccines enable the human body to compensate for many an infectious disease. No longer for a disease such as polio or measles or whooping cough need the body be completely unprepared for the onslaught; rather, a vaccine enables the unique signature of these and other contagions to be recognized by the body as pathogens, and enable it to produce an army of antibodies and other agents to systematically eradicate it.

Collection of poliovirus.

What if the entire human race stopped using vaccines altogether?

Many people would die. The science that goes into creating and refining vaccines would be absent, leaving the body to fend for itself against the elements, taking on from the environment whatever pathogens stray into its path.

However, many others would live. Sexual reproduction shuffles the cards of our genes between individuals, resulting in novel combinations of genetic traits, some of which will open the door to certain pathogens and slam them shut to others. For those who would survive, over long spans of time across many generations of human beings, the survivors would conceivably refine their immune systems to compensate for whatever pathogens their environment presents.

Of course, microbes also evolve, as evidenced by the emergence of MRSA; an antibiotic which is highly effective against one species of bacteria may prove ineffective against another, enabling the latter to thrive in spite of our best efforts to eliminate it. In the short term, it would seem that ideally vaccines provide relief from suffering by "tuning" the immune system to respond to pathogens. In the long term, however, the utility of vaccines is in my mind questionable.

Let's say we have a bacteria that causes the flesh to rapidly waste away and die, an uncompromisingly lethal, supercharged form of leprosy. 

Man aged 24 suffering from leprosy.

Science develops a vaccine which tunes the immune system to recognize and destroy this bacteria before it can take hold. Irrespective of whether your DNA already imparts a natural resistance to this bacteria or not, without fail a person who takes the vaccine will resist and survive. 

Now, remove the vaccine from the equation. Current and future generations must fend for themselves, and some will inevitably die, while others will suffer no consequences, having survived the bacteria by virtue of their natural immunity.

In the short term, we can dispense with vaccines and let children and adults contract diseases, suffer, and die. In the long term, diseases we fear today might be silently eradicated by our immune systems such that they no longer pose a threat. Vaccines today may indeed insulate us from suffering, and keep natural selection at bay by allowing those with insufficient immunity to withstand disease that might otherwise kill them.

"River of Time 2" by Scott Boden.

Question is, do we choose to take on nature without the benefit of safe, effective, rigorously-researched vaccines that do as they claim and prevent disease, or shrug our shoulders and keep a stiff upper lip as time marches on, serving as the ancestors of people in the far future who will benefit from our suffering in the form of immune systems tuned through the generations? 

I'm in favor of vaccines, provided that they are researched extensively so that they enable us to safely, effectively augment our ability to combat infectious disease. No offense to any of my future relatives, but if we can combat human suffering in the here and now, we should.

Solar Pool Heater DIY Leak Repair

Mighty Putty is one of the last products sponsored in part by the late Billy Mays.

Boasting the ability to bond numerous materials with the holding power of epoxy, including water pipes, I wondered whether this stuff could tackle a problem with some leaking HiTec solar pool heating panels.

Some years ago, I had a HiTec solar system installed to heat my swimming pool with solar energy. Consisting of a series of black panels of tubes which convey pool water up and onto the roof, given enough sunlight the system makes an otherwise chilly pool very swimmable.

Made of a rigid, ultraviolet-resistant plastic, the panels can be damaged by, say, falling tree branches or, as my contractor claimed, squirrels. The contractor who installed the system claimed that leaks that had developed in a couple of the panels recently were attributable to "squirrel damage" which conveniently for them is one type not covered by the manufacturer's limited warranty. 

Aside from the fact that no plastic-hungry squirrels nor squirrel spoor laden with plastic shavings had been discovered on my property, making determining the actual cause of the damage a difficult enterprise to say the least, this also meant that the contractor would be able to collect a roughly $135 service call fee to service the system for an out-of-warranty repair. How convenient that the contractor could fall back on these dastardly, elusive squirrels as the cause and not something actually covered by the warranty!

Commonly found, uncommonly evil, or so the contractor claims...

I wondered whether Mighty Putty might be able to save me some money.

I had basically two types of defects that had arisen in one of the panel arrays. One was a section of one of the tubes that appeared to have cracked off, a structural defect about 2" long.

Before application... a huge chunk of tube is missing.

Another consisted of pinhole leaks caused by abrasions to the plastic tubing, whether by falling tree branches impacting the panels, or the aforementioned scrabbling squirrels. Generally, since a solar system benefits from as much sun exposure as possible, installation under trees is inadvisable, but sometimes unavoidable. Unfortunately, a pine tree, a few of whose branches overhang the roof, probably were the culprit, both as a result of falling debris and as a squirrel habitat.

Following the instructions, I sliced about a 1" wide section of Mighty Putty, and kneaded it thoroughly for several minutes until it became a uniform, grayish consistency indicating that it's ready for use.

I roughened the area around the breach with some sandpaper and blew the resulting dust away. Then, I molded the putty into roughly the shape of a drinking straw cut in half lengthwise, large enough to encompass the hole and replace the missing plastic. Finally, I molded the putty patch onto the empty area and took care to apply even pressure all along the seam to ensure maximum contact with the plastic.

After application, covering the gap.

The pinhole leaks required slightly less putty to fix, but a similar process. To these I applied small dabs of putty sufficient to completely cover the holes.

For plumbing repairs, the makers of Mighty Putty boast a cure time of as little as 30 minutes before pressure is restored. HiTec states that their panels are pressure tested up to 90 psi, but that typically a swimming pool solar heating system will hover around 20 to 40 psi. I figured that this pressure is probably less than that of household plumbing. I would soon find out for sure. I climbed the roof, applied the putty, and allowed it to set for a full 24 hours just to be safe. The result? 

Success! The putty stopped the leaks in their tracks. 

It remains to be seen whether the putty will stand up to daily exposure to sun and chlorinated, pressurized pool water, but for now, the putty fully filled my expectations for far less than the cost of a service call, as well as saving me the time and trouble that would necessitate getting the perforated panel replaced outright.

Well done, Billy Mays. R.I.P.

Reddit-Headed Step Child?

Once again, Reddit has suffered a temporary meltdown.

CAPTAIN'S LOG, LAGDATE 6/24/2011... A brief emergency read-only mode last night, duplicate comments, sporadic 502 and 504 errors, and the occasional overloaded notification. Things bode ill for the weekend, but stay tuned.

Condé Nast Digital, parent company of Reddit, is one of several corporate entities owned by Advance Publications, Inc., a communications and print conglomerate.

Featuring among its ranks major sites like Wired, Vogue, Ars Technica, and others, many Reddit users, myself included, find it hard to believe that a site with upwards of one billion monthly pageviews seems to not get the creddit it deserves, in the form of infrastructure, staff, and just plain funding.

In short, why is Reddit seemingly Condé Nast Digital's red-headed step child?

 

Granted, since the diggsaster some months ago, Reddit has had an influx of new users which perhaps outpaced its anticipated growth. Further, Reddit recently dealt with some issues attributed to Amazon's Elastic Block Service (EBS) as well as a failure of a server which hadn't been updated to benefit from the redundancy of RAID. 

I really enjoy Reddit, it's a great site to find news, interact with people, and throw out horrible puns without threat of being stabbed with a narwhal tusk. Uptime, however, hasn't been it's strong point, so here's hoping things improve with help of some new and returning staff. 

Every site has issues occasionally, but given enough squeaking, the wheel gets greased...

---

To:  Condé Nast Digital

     Advance Publications, Inc.

From: The Reddit Users

RE: Grease

Squeak!

---

UPDATE (5/6/2011): Another emergency downtime for most of the day, preceded by sporadic 0 / 502 / 504 errors and apparent database corruption (including misdirected comments and private messages) in addition to the usual sluggishness around midday EST. Eep!

Motorola Razr meets PCI Simple Communications Controller

I picked up a used Alltel-branded Motorola Razr v3b for $2 at a yard sale recently. After reeling for a moment that new this phone probably ran for $150+ and now lay abandoned among pots and pans and power tools and other discarded housewares, I decided to charge it up and see whether any ringtones and other crap were on the phone.

I installed Motorola Phone Tools in an effort to transfer the data to my PC.

However, upon connecting the phone to my PC with a compatible USB data cable, one new device appeared in my system's Device Manager, a "PCI Simple Communications Controller" whose driver failed to install.

I opened the Properties of the device and selected the Hardware Ids property from the Details tab.

I searched for hits on the top entry: 

     PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_29A4&SUBSYS_514D8086&REV_02


This revealed that the device is the Intel Management Engine Interface, which lives on my Intel DP965LT motherboard. However, for whatever reason (perhaps just obsolescence) my Windows 7 Ultimate install couldn't find the appropriate drivers.

I downloaded the Intel® ME: Management Engine Driver for Intel 963/965 Chipset-Based Desktop Boards, but the installer supports XP and Vista, not 7. I found various forum posts that suggested working around this by trying to run the installer as administrator and in Vista compatibility mode, but this didn't work; the installer refused to run beyond copying the files to my PC at this location: 

     C:\Program Files\Intel Desktop Board\HECI_allOS_2.1.22.1033_PV 


I found another post that suggested attempting to update the drivers by having Windows search for drivers in the folder created above, and this did the trick. 

I right-clicked on the PCI Simple Communications Controller, clicked Update Driver Software..., then Browse my computer for driver software. I input the path to the drivers unpacked from the management engine package (C:\Program Files\Intel Desktop Board), then clicked Next:

The PCI Simple Communications Controller disappeared and in its place an Intel(R) Management Engine Interface device appeared instead under the System devices category:

When I again plugged the Motorola Razr v3b in via USB, this time the Driver Software Installation dialog reported success across the board, and Motorola Phone Tools could now properly communicate with the phone.

If nothing else, it'll serve me well as a spare digital camera, or maybe as a prop in some twisted video involving the destruction of formerly cutting edge electronics.