This is fast-breaking story if ever there was one, and it looks impossible from this perch to do any more than sample the coverage randomly. Web sites are updating stories hourly, even minutely. So what the Tracker will focus on in coming days are what might be called the metastories, the sidebars with information that’s a bit more durable.

One alarming sidebar that ought to be its own main story is David Brown‘s excellent piece in the Washington Post saying that the outbreak reporting system set up after SARS six years ago didn’t work well this time. Brown says that once the outbreak was first recognized in Mexico City, it took 18 days for the world at large to hear about it. “By the time international authorities became fully aware of the outbreak,” Brown writes, “there were about 800 cases and at least 50 deaths, and the virus was unknowingly being carried into other countries.” It’s a long story and sure to trigger investigations.

Jessica Mintz at the AP has a related story saying that weeks before CDC and WHO issued their warnings a small Seattle startup “already had a hunch something was up.” It’s an Internet-based system that tracks blogs, chat rooms, Twitter feeds and other publicly available Internet forums for signs that people are talking about a disease outbreak. The company, called Veratect, even issued some alerts before the public health agencies did.

Google is trying something similar by compiling search terms it receives from specific locations. Google.org is publishing its findings for Mexico, which appear to have logged a peak of flu-related searches in January and February but at levels below those seen in previous years.

Lost in most of the coverage is any discussion of how bad it is for an individual to get swine…oops, I mean H1N1 flu? After all, ordinary flu kills several hundred thousand people every year, and we live with that. In 1968 the so-called Hong Kong flu killed about a million people. The Tracker, then working at the Detroit Free Press, recalls that pandemic as something we hoped not to catch but didn’t get all that exercised over. Maggie Fox at Reuters makes a good start on explaining these things in the reader-friendly Q&A form. We need more examples of this kind of thing in other outlets.

Tracker fans, if you spot good examples of flu metastories, please send links to the Tracker via the “Suggest Stories” button at the top of this page. Please put only one link in each suggestion because our software is set to reject anything more spamlike.

-BR

David Adam and Alok Jha of The Guardian, in the U.K., put it quite succinctly: “The world has already burned half the fossil fuels necessary to bring about a 2C rise in average global temperature.” That’s the amount of added warming in Celsius–equal to 3.6 degrees F–that the IPCC has given as a danger level. In the second graf Adam and Jha write, the second half of the fossil fuel burning needed will take place in just the next 40 years if burning continues at current levels.

In other words, it’s taken all of human history to burn the first half of the carbon, and it will take only four more decades to double the amount.

Climate scientists and activists have been trying various ways of putting the situation into words that will shake people up. Not clear whether this “carbon budget” approach will do it, but it’s a nice try. The Guardian story and a spate of others are based on several reports out in today’s Nature by an international group of scientists. Nature’s “editor’s summary” is here. This, incidentally, is a nifty service by the journal. Wonder which “editor” does these?
The Nature articles also estimate that of all the economically recoverable fossil fuels still available, only about one-third can be burned before the year 2100 if the 2 degree C warming is to be avoided. (By the way, the Tracker chose the photo above because it was amusing, not because he believed it to be anything more than a Photoshop product.)

Gerard Wynn‘s story for Reuters puts it a little differently, saying we can burn only one quarter of the reserves “to be confident of staying within safer climate limits.” That means the chance of exceeding the 2 degree C danger limit is reduced to 25 percent.

Sid Perkins, at Science News, also had the story and includes a nice bit of technical detail as well as explaining the concept that what matters for the climate is a fairly simple relationship between the total amount of carbon sent into the atmosphere and the amount of warming it causes. In other words, over the long run, it doesn’t matter whether you burn the fuels today or tomorrow. “If you burn a ton of carbon today, then you can’t burn it tomorrow,” he quotes one of the Nature authors as saying in a teleconference .

A sampling of other accounts:

Alexis Madrigal in Wired discusses the Nature papers’ effort to simplify the presentation of the climate situation.

Keith Johnson on a Wall Street Journal blog, links this story with swine flu: “If the specter of a global pandemic hasn’t dampened your week yet, how about this: Avoiding catastrophic climate change looks to be even tougher than everybody thought.”

AP‘s Seth Borenstein also gives the reports a pessimistic slant, closing with this quote from Steve Schneider on the reports’ estimate of the danger of exceeding the carbon limit: “If you had a 25 percent chance that walking into a room would give you serious flu, would you?”

-BR

There’s been debate for years about whether global warming makes hurricanes more powerful or increases their frequency or, maybe, both. Now it appears that this may be part of a feedback loop because, as Sid Perkins reports in the online edition of Science News, there is good evidence that the trees blown down by hurricanes (and subsequently burned or decomposed) send a significant amount of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. It’s pretty much the same effect as burning a rain forest.

Perkins’s story is based on research published in PNAS by an ecological geographer (The Tracker has long had a fondness for geographers, whose research is often neglected by science journalists.) who studied the distribution and impacts of hurricanes and tropical storms hitting the U.S. coast since 1851. (That’s his map up there, the red marking areas that sustain tropical storm-strength winds or stronger at least once every three years.) Each year, on average, those storms blow down a surprising 97 million trees, which subsequently release more than 90 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. That’s relatively small in the overall picture but way above the negligible category.

-BR

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Swine have just given us back the viruses that we once passed to them. With a few modifications…

A estas alturas ya todos sabemos que un virus porcino ha dado el salto a la especie humana. Lo que quizás se nos escapaba es lo que cuenta El País por medio del excelente reportaje de Javier Sampedro: nosotros les habíamos pasado el H1N1 a ellos mucho antes.
Como explica Javier, los dos principales virus que habitan en los cerdos son el H1N1 y el H3N2. El segundo lo recibieron de nuestra gripe de Hong Kong the 1968, y el primero les llegó tras la gran pandemia de la gripe española en 1918.
A nosotros nos vino de otro lado. El H1N1 era un virus aviar antes de que en 1918 mutara para permitir ser transmitido a los humanos y causar 40 millones de muertos. Fue tan propagado que se quedó como la principal cepa de virus de nuestra gripe durante décadas, tiempo en el que se transmitió a otras especies de animales.
Unas investigaciones recientes demuestran que el H1N1 es mortal en la mayoría de mamíferos excepto en los cerdos. Eso permitió que se fuera reproduciendo tranquilamente en sus cuerpos hasta mutar a variedades que podían saltar a humanos. Se calcula que esto ha ocurrido hasta 17 veces en Europa, pero nunca ha causado situaciones graves.
Los cerdos también se pueden infectar con virus aviares, con lo que son cocteleras ideales para la creación de nuevos virus. De hecho, el H1N1 que está causando la peste porcina es la combinación de 4 virus: uno humano, uno aviar, uno porcino norteamericano, y uno porcino euroasiático. La casualidad ha hecho que sea muy transmisible entre humanos.
Esto último es incluso más importante que su severidad. Como explica el artículo de Javier Sampedro, el famoso H5N1 de la última alarma de gripe aviar presentaba una mortalidad altísima del 61 %, y el SARS un 17%. El de la gripe española de 1918 sólo un 2.5%, pero causó 40 millones de muertes por su facilidad de transmisión. Esperemos que éste no sea el caso…

- PE

(English intro to Spanish lang. post) Swine flu: Good and accurate coverage in Latin America and Spain, but more science stories are needed.

El 24 de abril México confirmaba que unas 20 personas habían fallecido por causa de un virus de la gripe que provenía de los cerdos.
El 25 de abril la OMS afirma que el virus H1N1 podría causar una epidemia mundial. EEUU asegura que se propaga fácilmente, que no pueden contenerlo, y que deberíamos estar preparándonos para lo peor.
El 26 de abril se detectan tres posibles casos en España, de personas que habían viajado a México.
El 27 de abril se cierran colegios en México, se confirman dos casos de gripe porcina en Reino Unido, y aumentan a 40 en EEUU. Se intentan controlar las voces de alarma.
28 de abril: En México ya han muerto 152 personas. El gobierno lanza mensajes alentadores, pero en DF se prohíbe comer en bares y restaurantes. Ya hay ocho países afectados:  México, Costa Rica, EEUU, Canadá, Nueva Zelanda, España, el Reino Unido e Israel.
El 29 de abril 2009 Cuba y Argentina suspenden los vuelos con México. En Austria aparece una mujer contagiada que viajó a Guatemala e hizo escala en México. Obama pide al congreso 1.500 millones de dólares para hacerle frente al virus. Egipto anuncia que sacrificará todos sus cerdos. Aparecen gran cantidad de casos sospechosos en América Latina. Se confirman 3 nuevas infecciones en Alemania. En España ya son 10. Freno de las exportaciones de México, consecuencias para su sector turístico, y preocupación por las repercusiones económicas. La OMS eleva el nivel de alerta pandémica por la gripe porcina a la fase 5 (de una escala de 6) ante la imparable expansión del virus.

La información científica en los medios va apareciendo en cuentagotas, y las dudas sobre la severidad o no de este brote de gripe porcina fluctúan entre un “no hay para tanto” y un “se acerca una pandemia”.
El rastreador científico le resulta imposible abarcar la avalancha de noticias relacionadas con la gripe porcina que se están generando en las publicaciones en español, pero sí tiene la sensación general que a pesar de ser una situación mucho más grave, la cobertura periodística parece estar siendo menos alarmista que años atrás con el caso de la gripe aviar. Quizás es debido a que en ese momento tal alarma social quedó en prácticamente nada.

A partir de ahora aquí nos limitaremos a destacar noticias sobre gripe porcina que presenten un relevante contenido científico, o aborden aspectos que merezcan la pena ser comentados desde el aspecto periodístico, pero antes hagamos una escueta revisión a algunas historias de caracter local:

Guatemala: En la frontera sur de México, para Prensa Libre C. Méndez y S. Valdez informaban que el ingreso de peste porcina era inminente. Es obvio que el virus no conoce fronteras, sin embargo de momento los 3 casos sospechosos han sido descartados.

EEUU: Y en la frontera norte, el Houston Chronicle informaba que en un hospital de dicha ciudad se había producido la primera víctima de gripe porcina en EEUU. Se trataba de un niño mexicano de 23 meses recién regresado de su pais.

Cuba: Al Este de México, en Granma Jose A. De la Osa asegura  que Cuba no ha recibido ni un solo caso de gripe porcina. En su buena nota explica que en EEUU anteriormente ya había sufrido brotes de H1N1, pero siempre por contacto directo de cerdos con humanos. La nueva variante es más peligrosa porque se puede transmitir entre humanos.

República Dominicana: El Nacional informa que la mexicana bajo sospecha no estaba contagiada. En la prensa consultada de este país no ha encontrado todavía referencias científicas.

El Salvador: Por debajo de Guatemala, Yamileh Cáceres para El Salvador explica que “el mundo se prepara para una pandemia”, que en su país hay 3 casos sospechosos, y que están frente a una emergencia nacional de consecuencias impredecibles.
Se destaca también  la máquina instalada en los aeropuertos para medir la temperatura (fiebre) de todos los que deseen entrar al pais. Tampoco hemos apreciado información científica al respecto.

Honduras: En La Prensa, San Pedro Sula presenta una nota muy completa sobre los 7 casos sospechosos en su país. La tribuna refleja la petición de ayuda a la OMS hecha en Managua (Nicaragua) por los gobiernos de Centroamérica, tras la confirmación del primer caso en Costa Rica.

Nicaragua: En el momento que el rastreador visitó la página online de El Nuevo Diario, su portada estaba repleta de noticias relacionadas con la gripe aviar. Una cobertura profunda, con titulares contundentes como “el virus puede estar aquí”, o “estamos indefensos”

Costa Rica: Krissia Morris Gray para La Prensa Libre explica los dos casos confirmados que convierten a Costa Rica en el primer país centroamericano con gripe porcina.
Sorprende que la excelente sección sobre ciencia, tecnología y salud Aldea Global de La Nación no presente todavía un reportaje de contenido científicos sobre el asunto. Lo esperamos.

Panamá: La Prensa presenta una buena cobertura de la evolución global de esta posible pandemia, pero no se reflejan casos sospechosos en el país.

Colombia: No hay casos confirmados, pero según El Tiempo hay 10 casos sospechosos y 49 en observación. El Colombiano.com tiene un buen especial, en el que incluye un sencillo y actualizado mapa mundial para seguir los casos de esta enfermedad.

Venezuela, Ecuador, Perú, Bolivia, Paraguay: Sólo se apunta algún caso sospechoso aislado. Poca información de carácter científico.

Uruguay: El Observador habla de “fuerte sospecha” sobre una mexicana recién llegada a Uruguay. En El Pais, Pablo Meléndrez explica que miles de personas han agotado el stock de una vacuna contra la gripe que no previene frente a la porcina

Chile: La Tercera posee una sección de Ciencia muy completa, pero de nuevo, todavía no ofrece ninguna nota de alto contenido científico sobre el H1N1 y la gripe porcina. Esta falta de reacción –no sólo de este periódico- es algo sobre lo que reflexionar. Cristian Chandía tiene una buena nota diciendo que los expertos no recomiendan ampliar la vacunación, porque no es seguro que sea efectiva contra la gripe porcina.

Argentina: El rastreador va escribiendo a medida que lee, y le empieza a escamar que en la sección de Ciencia y Salud de La Nación tampoco aparezca ningún reportaje especial sobre la visión más científica de la gripe porcina. Las noticias en este periódico y Clarín son de carácter más bien social.

España: Mucha cobertura, sobre todo debido a que ha sido el primer lugar fuera de México donde se ha producido un contagio indirecto. Como explica Rafael J. Álvarez, en el momento de escribir su nota para El Mundo había 70 casos sospechosos, y 10 confirmados, uno de los cuales el novio de una joven que visitó México.

BBC Mundo: buena cobertura en este medio. Maria Elena Navas aprovecha el tirón para escribir una historia sobre los tipos de virus de la gripe y porqué los científicos no han conseguido terminar con ella. Y cómo se busca el origen del H1N1.

A México le dedicaremos un post específico. Y seguiremos en búsqueda constante, pero a partir de ahora sólo de los trabajos de periodismo científico más originales y notorios.

- PE

There’s no way the Tracker can keep up with all the swine flu stories. As of 1 pm on the East Coast, Google News counted more than 41,000 current stories on the outbreak that WHO said Wednesday is moving toward pandemic status. The number keeps growing. Check Google News for the most current list.

What the Tracker has not yet seen is a good story explaining that we have been through several influenza pandemics since the fabled Spanish Flu of 1918-1920 and that the U.S. death rates from them have not been appreciably different from the annual flu epidemics that most of us take in stride. One reason is that many of the earlier deaths were caused by concurrent bacterial infections, and we now have antibiotics. Also, we have much better supportive care to keep victims alive while their immune systems do the detail work.

Below are a couple of closer looks at parts of the swine flu coverage.

-BR

Flu vaccines are still produced in a half-century-old method of incubating the offending virus in fertile chicken eggs. It’s a slow process, and at that rate, it’s going to take until January to produce enough swine flu vaccine to protect all Americans. At the earliest, Andrew Pollack adds in his story in Wednesday New York Times, the vaccine could be ready in late November. That means seven to nine months of hand-wringing for a good many Americans.

Protection for the rest of the world? That could take years, Pollack writes. He explains that a variety of new vaccine-making methods, such as the use of vats of cultured cells, are being developed, but that none is ready for this time.

-BR

Swine flu outbreaks continue to dominate the coverage of many news organizations, so much so that the New York Times covered the media onslaught  from two angles. Tim Arango and Brian Stelter have a compact story on doctors seeing patients frightened by incessant drumbeating, especially on cable news. Meanwhile, Gardiner Harris notes that the CDC’s acting director, Richard Besser, at right, looks comfortable on TV because he previously spent years as a television health reporter at a San Diego station. More importantly, he seems able to communicate the facts in a hypefree form. Something to be said for media training and experience.

-BR

It’s been a problem for generations, the way the pharmaceutical industry tries to win the hearts and minds of doctors. They do it by giving the dox small stuff (pens, pads of paper, etc.) and big stuff (free trips to exotic locations, cruises, consulting fees, etc.). Former editors of the New England Journal of Medicine have written books exposing it. Various medical industry watchdogs have attacked it.

Now, in what may be the most powerful criticism yet of the practices, the prestigious Institute of Medicine has issued a report saying all of these drug industry behaviors put doctors into a huge conflict of interest, a conflict that often forces patients’ interests below those of the drug companies and the doctors themselves. The IOM, one of the three National Academies, issued sweeping recommendations to clean up the practices.

“In a scolding report, the nation’s most influential medical advisory group said doctors should stop taking much of the money, gifts and free drug samples they routinely accept from drug and device companies,” was the neatly summary lede the prolific Gardiner Harris put on his New York Times story.

John Fauber of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel wrote that “the integrity of the medical field [is] at stake.”

The Wall Street Journal‘s Jonathan D. Rockoff wrote of “the severity of its recommendations.”

The AP‘s Matthew Perrone summed up the problem in his lede: “Millions of dollars in gifts, travel and consulting fees…”

These stories all list the major recommendations. The full IOM report can be downloaded from here.

-BR

One of every science writer’s best friends is the superlative–the biggest, the smallest, the oldest, the megath. It’s a natural for a lede and sure to help a sciencephobic editor see that it’s a story worth printing.

And so it came to pass that astronomers analyzing date from NASA’s Swift satellite have just discovered the oldest object in the universe—a 10-second gamma ray burst from a star that exploded and died when the universe was but 630 million years old. That’s a star that lived fast and died young. The glow from that supernova began traveling toward Earth some 8.6 billion years before Earth formed. The photons from that supernova started their journey 13.1 billion years ago. The image above was from a follow-up examination by the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, spotting the afterglow.

One of the first to get the story was New Scientist‘s Web writer Rachel Courtland, who had it on Monday.

Ron Cowen, Science News‘s veteran astronomy writer, had a brief note early Tuesday morning, beating much of the crowd. The hed: ” Most Distant Known Object in the Universe.”

BBC News’s Jonathan Amos quotes a UK scientist saying, “This gets us into a realm where we’ve never been before.” Amos gives good background and explanation.

John Matson on SciAm.com’s “60-Second Science Blog,” calculates that the star died “when the universe was less than 5 percent of its present age.” That’s a nice way to help readers sense the scale.

The usually insightful Bad Astronomy blog on Discover.com makes the story into a saga. It begins: “The light had been traveling a long time, oh, such a long time. It had passed gas clouds” and kept on going. “After spending the age of the universe careening through it, those few remaining photons finally saw something blocking their path…” There’s more of this thrilling adventure here. The post reads like something between a satire and a serious, if purple, report. Can’t ignore those superlatives.

-BR

If any disease needs to be covered carefully, it’s autism, what with anguished parents often grasping at straws or angrily blaming putative causes without good evidence. Now, with the discovery of what are said to be the first common genes linked to autism (at least one estimated to play a key role in 15 percent of cases), we may see a naive leap to a belief that parents must have transmitted “the gene” to their children.

But this story is even more complicated because several genes are now implicated, each with a different perceived prominence in the search for causes. It is a hugely tricky process to interpret the statistics of multiple genetic roles, and many reporters are notoriously poor at doing this.
One benefit is that as the complexity of multiple genetic roles gains prominence, we may see a fading of the unfounded belief that autism is a side effect of vaccines.

Two new reports in Nature and one in Molecular Psychiatry, Faye Flam writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer, “back the consensus that there is no single autism gene, but perhaps 100 ways to develop the disorder.” In addition to the one fairly common gene, researchers have found 13 others strongly linked to autism. Several of the genes involved are thought to play roles in the way neurons form and break synapses. Flam gives lots of good (and surprisingly complex) detail. Looks like she got more space because a big part of the work was done at a local hospital.

Other accounts:

While some stories claim that the findings offer hope for a cure, Maggie Fox, Reuters‘s veteran reporter notes in the third graf that “these findings do not immediately offer hope for a treatment.”

Deborah Kotz at U.S. News‘s Web site offers a Q&A on what the findings mean for parents, a format that allows lengthy quotes from scientists. It’s a good technique that the Tracker believes should be used more often, especially on the Web.

New Scientist‘s Linda Geddes quotes one researcher saying the most common gene variant is present in 65 percent of autism cases, a figure at huge odds with the 15 percent figure most other reporters used. That big number was in the hed, but way down in the story we learn that the same researcher thinks that gene plays “a central role” in only about 15 percent of cases. One fact complicating interpretation: 60 percent of normal people also have that gene variant.

-BR

Lots of species have had their genomes sequenced by now, but once in a while there is an especially significant addition to the menagerie. Now it’s the cow, specifically a red-and-white hereford like the one shown here. Much of the coverage happened a week ago, but the Tracker missed it.

Marilyn Chase had a suitably business-oriented account on Bloomberg, pointing out the commercial potential of building better bovines. But to this Tracker’s eye, the most evocative lede was by David Brown of the Washington Post. He wrote: “The genomes of man and dog have been joined in the scientific barnyard by the genome of the cow, an animal that walked beside them on the march to civilization.” That’s a nice way of tying a technical (and boring to some) event to an hugely important historic process. Brown goes on to note that the genome shows signs of human-controlled cattle breeding.

Among other news outlets, one of the strangest ledes was by the AP‘s  Randolph E. Schmid, who turned to Ogden Nash for inspiration. Schmid opened: “The cow is of the bovine ilk, one end is moo, the other, milk. Now science knows why which is which, they’ve read the genome without a hitch.”

-BR