REPORT: Giant Snakes Threaten U.S.

Jeeez.  I get up in the morning and I like a nice hot shower.  It's relaxing.  I get home from the gym and I like to take a nice cool relaxing shower.  If I'm feeling sick and under the weather, a hot steamy eucalyptus shower always makes me feel better.  But now, all I'm going to think about are the millions of little nasty bacterias that I am inhaling.  I will wonder if that little annoying sniffle is because of my love of showers. 

Dangerous Pathogens Live in Showerheads

Sept. 14, 2009 -- It's warm and damp and dark -- the perfect place for bacteria to nestle and stay for a while.

It turns out that that's just what they do -- in your showerhead.

What's more, says a new study, the mucky film of microorganisms lining the inside of your showerhead often harbors bacteria that can cause lung disease, including a cough, fever, fatigue and weight loss.

These mycobacteria -- close relatives of the bacterium that causes tuberculosis -- can be more than 100 times more prevalent in showerheads than in the water in the pipes just upstream, a research team found.

Infections with such non-tuberculosis mycobacteria have risen in recent years, up six fold since 1997, according to a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The bacteria don't threaten healthy people, but those with cystic fibrosis, AIDS, recent organ transplants or other immune-compromising conditions are at risk of an infection.

"There's been a growing voice in the medical field hypothesizing that showering has caused some of this increase," said the study's lead author, Leah Feazel of the University of Colorado, Boulder. "One hundred years ago, people bathed, they didn't shower."

The problem is not just that the microorganisms are enriched in the showerhead, Feazel said. It's also that the spray nozzle creates a fine mist of tiny water droplets. "These tiny, tiny particles can go all the way into your deep lungs," she said.

"Most of us are in the shower long enough to inhale a fairly reasonable amount of mycobacteria," Joe Falkinham of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg told Discovery News.

Feazel and colleagues isolated and sequenced DNA from showerheads and compared the findings with a database of DNA sequences to determine what organisms were living in the showerhead.

The study considered 45 different sites in nine U.S. cities, sampling several sites repeatedly to get a feeling for how microbial communities changed over time.

"The results showed that there's a very complex community inside most shower heads," Feazel said. "There are lots of different species. One of those is Mycobacterium avium, which causes pulmonary disease in people who are immune compromised."

Mycobacteria have a waxy exterior that makes them prone to stick to surfaces and join mats of microorganisms known as biofilms. Even the small amount of organic matter remaining in water supplies is enough to feed these organisms.

If you are scrubbing out your showerhead already, put the sponge down.

Disinfecting the showerhead might make things worse, the researchers found. They tried cleaning one showerhead with bleach and found that it carried even more mycobacteria after the cleaning than before. "Mycobacteria are known to be very chlorine resistant," Feazel said. "By using bleach, we probably killed everything else."

The researchers recommend that those people who are at risk of infection take baths instead of showering. Metal showerheads appear to foster less growth than plastic showerheads, although many showerheads that look metallic are actually plastic. Another option is to buy a cheap showerhead and change it every few months Feazel said.

It's also a good idea to open the window while you shower, Falkinham said, and to keep your water heater above 130 degrees, which he acknowledges runs counter to energy-saving advice to turn the heat down.

"Once you're infected with mycobacteria, you're always infected," he said. "The drug therapy requires multiple drugs. If a patient can tolerate the drugs, they'll get rid of the disease symptoms. They'll never get rid of the organisms."

Unlike tuberculosis, these mycobacteria are not transmitted from person to person.

While it might make us feel a little dirty to know what is lurking at the very source of our washing up, the presence of these microbes is better than skipping the chlorine treatment in our water systems, Falkinham notes.

"These are normal inhabitants that, as we have cleaned up our environment, now find a niche in which to grow," he said, "but it's a lot better than having a water system that has shigella or salmonella or one of the real pathogens.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/09/14/showerhead-pathogens.html

Alright - I'm always saying that I don't buy into the whole Global Warming effort.  I think it's trendy and something that a marketing genuis came up with to sell more products.  We do recycle and it's not like we go out of our way to not care - but I don't go out of my way to be extra green.  However, if my Stella starts tasting bad - I may re-visit my thoughts on the subject.

We are beginning to see the effects of the wholesale abuse of our planet first-hand. We all know the polar ice caps are melting, that huge landmasses are turning into dust bowls and various species of animals are popping out of existence, but the general response to this slow-moving train wreck of an ecological disaster is all too often: "So? What can we do about it? Besides, it's not hurting me."

http://blogs.discovery.com/space_disco/2009/09/now-we-have-a-problem-global-warming-is-impacting-beer-production.html

I think this is a great picture.

Cuban Tree Frog, Florida

Photograph by James Snyder

I'm glad he is ok.  Damn!  He sure is a cute puppy! 

(Mom - I have pictures coming. Do as I tell Stewart, "Be patient.")

Mucky Pup Saved In Dramatic Toilet Rescue

11:34am UK, Monday June 15, 2009

A week-old cocker spaniel was the subject of an emergency rescue after being accidentally flushed down his owner's toilet.

Dyno needed more than a doggy paddle to save him from the sewer

The tiny pooch was trapped in a waste pipe for almost four hours after four-year-old Daniel Blair decided he "needed a wash" in the loo and pulled the chain.

Frantic attempts to find the flushed puppy began, but all efforts by the fire brigade and the RSPCA at the house in Northolt, Middlesex, failed.

The 'plumb' job landed to drain experts Dyno-Rod, who used specialist camera gear to locate the crying pet in a pipe 20 yards away from the Blairs' home.

Neighbours were warned not to flush their toilets to prevent him from being pushed into the main sewer and an engineer from the firm was called.

Will Craig, 22, from Harrow in Middlesex, said he was initially reluctant to nudge the pup towards a manhole cover, "because I was scared of hurting (him)".

"But the RSPCA said I was his only hope," he told the Daily Mirror. "Eventually I pushed him far enough for the firemen to grab."

Cheering broke out as the pet was plucked out of the manhole to complete the rescue.

The young dog is recovering well after his draining experience and has been named Dyno in tribute to his rescuers.

Distraught Daniel said he was "so, so sorry" about flushing Dyno down the toilet, vowing: " I won't do it again".

 **** The link below has a little video that shows him all cleaned up and he's so cute! ****

http://www.pawnation.com/2009/06/16/week-old-puppy-recovering-after-being-flushed-down-the-toilet/?icid=main|main|dl7|link3|http%3A%2F%2Fwww.pawnation.com%2F2009%2F06%2F16%2Fweek-old-puppy-recovering-after-being-flushed-down-the-toilet%2F

This is yet another reason why I won't swim in water if I can't see the bottom.  Look at the size of this thing!  It makes me think of the scene from Finding Nemo, "don't touch the tentacles.  Only the tops!"

Monster Jellyfish

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/slideshows/monster-jellyfish.html

Bill:  See dumping junk into the ocean is good for the environment! 

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Ship to become 2nd largest intentional reef

KEY WEST, Fla. (AP) - Aboard the Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg, a massive World War II ship last used by the U.S. Air Force to track missiles and spacecraft, it's anything but business as usual.

Crews are preparing the decommissioned ship for sinking Wednesday seven miles off Key West, where it will become one of the world's biggest man-made reefs. Explosives attached to the ship's hull beneath the water level will be detonated to open it for flooding, which should quickly send it to the sea floor. The 17,000 ton, 523-foot-long ship will be sunk on a sandy bottom in about 140 feet of clear water.

''Don't go to the bathroom. Don't go get a beer. It should be under three minutes for the ship to fully deploy onto the bottom,'' said Joe Weatherby, project organizer at Reefmakers, a Moorestown, N.J.-based company that specializes in acquiring, preparing and sinking craft to create artificial reefs.

It's a project that has been years in the making.

The cost is about $8.6 million, from acquiring the ship to cleaning it. Officials in the Florida Keys expect it to pay dividends, up to $8 million in annual tourism-related revenue, mostly from divers flocking to get a look at the underwater spectacle.

The idea is to not only to attract tourists, but to help protect the Keys' natural reefs, already suffering from excessive diving, snorkeling and fishing along with warming ocean temperatures.

Weatherby said people - and fish - will now be drawn to the wreck from nearby natural coral, ''giving the reef a breather, which is what it needs.''

Preparation for sinking has taken months of inspections and cleanup to remove contaminants. Workers hauled off more than a million feet of wire, 1,500 vent gaskets, dozens of watertight steel doors, 81 bags of asbestos, 193 tons of potentially cancer-causing substances, 46 tons of garbage that could come loose and float to the surface, 300 pounds of materials containing mercury and 185 55-gallon drums of paint chips.

The cleanup was performed at two Norfolk, Va., shipyards before the boat made the 1,100-mile voyage, arriving in Key West on April 22. Permitting was required from 18 local, state and federal agencies.

The Vandenberg began as the Gen. Harry Taylor and was later commissioned by the Army as a transport vessel, ferrying troops and supplies from San Francisco to island bases in the western Pacific Ocean in 1944.

In 1945, it carried troops home from Europe near the end of World War II. It was later used by the Navy as a transport ship, and was transferred to the Air Force in 1961, when it was renamed the Vandenberg.

For about 20 more years, the ship served as a missile tracker throughout the height of the Cold War and was retired in 1983.

Mac Monroe, a former mission controller aboard the Vandenberg, said he was pleased the ship won't be turned into scrap metal.

''It's nice to see the old rust bucket again,'' Monroe said on a recent trip to Key West to see the ship. ''And it's a positive outcome for it be sunk and become something useful again.''

Organizers say it will serve as ''the anchor'' to the region's wide array of existing sunken vessels and wrecks from Key Largo to Key West, where some estimate there's a shipwreck about every 300 yards.

The rusty hulk is now tied up at a dock awaiting its final resting place on the ocean floor.

Organizers hope the Vandenberg sinking goes more smoothly than that of the Spiegel Grove off Key Largo in 2002. That 510-foot decommissioned landing ship dock partially sank upside-down, hours before an attempt to scuttle it to create an artificial reef. The sudden sinking sent 40 workers onboard scrambling for safety and left the ship's bow sticking out of the water for three weeks.

The Vandenberg will become the world's second largest intentionally sunk artificial reef.

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http://journal-news.net/page/content.detail/id/520073.html?nav=5006