The Secret to Tracking Ebola, MERS, and Flu? Sewers - The Daily Beast

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UNDERWORLD11.29.14
The Secret to Tracking Ebola, MERS, and Flu? Sewers
MIT Professor Eric Alm thinks that sewers are the missing link to tracking public health. So far, his research is promising.
If there was a way to track the transmission of pathogens that cause diseases such as Ebola, MERS, or the flu, where could we do so? Eric Alm, a professor of microbiology at MIT, has an idea: use the sewers.
While we may think that planes, trucks, and cars constitute the bulk of what’s moving in and out of the city, it may be both surprising and obvious to hear that the bulk of mass coming in and out of a city on any given day is actually water. For the enormous quantities of clean water that are piped in, an equal amount of sewage is piped out. “Almost all of our human activities leave a chemical trace in the water,” says Alm. “There’s an enormous richness of information by looking in the water that’s indicative of what’s going in a city in a real-time fashion. We want to tap into that source of information and develop it into an information platform.”

Yaniv Jacob Turgeman, a graduate student at MIT and a lead researcher in the Alm and Senseable City Labs, refers to the sewage project as “Underworlds.” He describes the sewage system of a city to be analogous to the urban gut, hosting the microbiome of the city.

“The sewage system is the world underneath the one we inhabit and interact. Its infrastructure aggregates our collective metabolic activities, and is a waste stream rich with biomedical information that can be useful from a public health perspective,” Turgeman says. “Just as how our nervous systems sense our information in our gastrointestinal tract, Underworlds aims to extend the ability to understand our health by sensing the gut of the city.”

So, by going into the belly of the beast of any given city, we can ultimately determine what diseases are being spread, what drugs are being used, and what people are eating.

Currently, real-time surveillance systems of disease do not exist. At best, the flu is tracked on platforms set up by the CDC, which reports cases of the flu only after someone has gone to see the doctor. State and public health agencies work similarly, but nothing is reported in real-time. FluTrends shows us where people in the U.S. are Googling flu symptoms, but that doesn’t truly give insight into real-time transmission. HealthMap has been used previously to track diseases such as H1N1 and dengue fever by scouring social media and local news from across the world to pinpoint hotspots and display them on an interactive map. Despite these valiant efforts, nothing comes quite as close as to the system MIT wants to develop to forecast disease transmission before people start Googling disease symptoms and start seeing physicians.

Last year, the Underworlds team conducted pilot studies in the city of Boston, bringing back over 10 liters of sewage into the lab.

“We’re a poop-only lab,” says Alm, “So none of this grossed my lab out.”

The early, exploratory phase of Underworlds demonstrated that viruses like the flu and human bacteria were actually detectable in sewage. These preliminary results give us hope that the project will succeed in the coming years.

Underworlds is receiving a $4 million dollar grant from the Kuwait government, via the Kuwait-MIT collaboration, to investigate the use of sewers as an “urban laboratory.” Since there’s little precedent research on detecting disease in sewers, aside from the promising early studies from last year, this project is admittedly risky. With the funding, key graduate student researchers Turgeman and Mariana Matus are leading the more routine testing of sewers in the Cambridge area, in collaboration with the Cambridge Public Health Department.

Not only will this project be useful in the context of tracking disease, but smart sewers can also provide us information if new public health policies are having the intended effect without decades of research. For example, Kuwait recently put a limit the allowable amount of sodium in bread to lower blood pressure. Instead of conducting a longer-term, more expensive 4-8 year study, identifying ‘high blood pressure’ signatures in the sewage can give us insight that would be difficult to obtain. Bacteria and other metabolites correlated with obesity and/or malnutrition can also be determined after extensive research, and the levels of these bacteria could be active tracked in real-time with a system like Underworlds.

Before we’re able to live in a world where sewers are smart enough to tell us about the dietary habits and epidemiology of a city, an enormous amount of work must be first done by hand. Starting out, the Underworlds team must decide how to make the information provided by sewage meaningful: How can we determine population size from sewage? What specific bacteria and viruses can be detected in the sewage? And, when is the best time to sample?

About a century ago, sewer systems were still yet to be streamlined: an unexpected efflux of sewage during a heavy rainfall drained into a dam in Ithaca, NY, causing over one thousand town residents to come down with typhoid fever. Today, sewage overflow is rarely an issue in developed cities. It’s exciting to think that in perhaps merely 20 years, we can have smart sewers telling us more information than we’d care to know, like what you ate—and how much—at your Thanksgiving dinner.

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GUNS BLAZING12.02.14
The Cleveland Cops Who Fired 137 Shots and Cried Victim
They unleashed a hail of bullets to rival the final scene in ‘Bonnie and Clyde.’ But the man and women killed in 2012 were unarmed—and now these cops are claiming racial discrimination.
Nine of the 13 Cleveland cops who fired 137 shots at two apparently unarmed black civilians following a high-speed chase in 2012 have filed a federal lawsuit saying they are victims of racial discrimination.

Really.

Eight of the aggrieved cops are white. The ninth is Hispanic. They charge that the city of Cleveland has “a history of treating non-African American officers involved in the shootings of African Americans substantially harsher than African-American officers.”

As if their race was the deciding factor in the cops being kept on restricted duty for 16 months after a backfire mistaken for a gunshot and an ensuing cross-town chase led to police firing nearly as many shots at the unarmed Melissa Williams and Timothy Russell as were unleashed upon Bonnie and Clyde in their famous final shootout—leaving Melissa with 24 gunshot wounds to Bonnie’s 23 and Timothy with 23 to Clyde’s 25.

Replay the last scene of the movie Bonnie and Clyde in your mind, only replace the decidedly armed and deadly pair with a homeless duo armed with nothing in the car besides a couple of crack pipes and an empty Coca-Cola can.

The Cleveland Nine should count themselves lucky that they were returned to full duty after 16 months.

Just imagine if one of them had been the cop who fatally shot a black 12-year-old named Tamir Rice after he flashed a realistic looking toy gun in a Cleveland park late last month.

There is already a damning common denominator between the two shootings: the Cleveland police department itself.

After the 2012 shooting, an investigation by the Ohio Attorney General’s Office found the department far more to blame than the individual cops.

And some of the same failures in communication and tactics seem to have played a major role in the more recent tragedy involving young Tamir.

In announcing the results of his investigation into the 2012 deaths, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine did make clear that no report would have been necessary if Russell had not sped wildly away from police in his 1979 Malibu with Williams at his side, reaching speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour. Russell had been pulled over for the most minor of traffic violations by a cop who had a hunch that he and Williams had been buying drugs.

“To state the obvious, the chase would have ended without tragic results if Timothy Russell had simply stopped the car in response to the police pursuit,” DeWine said as he released the report in February 2013. “Perhaps the alcohol and cocaine in his system impaired his judgment. We will never know.”

DeWine went on: “We do know that each officer at the scene believed he or she was dealing with a driver who had fled law enforcement. They each also believed they were dealing with a passenger who was brandishing a gun—and that the gun had been fired at a police officer. It is now clear that those last two beliefs were likely not true.”

He said something that applies to cops of whatever race in whatever jurisdiction.

“Police officers have a very difficult job. They must make life and death decisions in a split second based on whatever information they have in that moment. But when you have an emergency, like what happened that night, the system has to be strong enough to override subjective decisions made by individuals who are under that extreme stress.”

He continued: “Policy, training, communications, and command have to be so strong and so ingrained to prevent subjective judgment from spiraling out of control. The system has to take over and put on the brakes.”

As it was, the chase was accompanied and spurred on by apparently erroneous radio reports of the occupants firing and reloading a gun. And it all culminated in a middle-school parking lot with the cops mistaking gunfire from other cops as coming from inside the suspect’s car and blazing away as if they had encountered a modern day Bonnie and Clyde rather than just unarmed Melissa and Timothy.

“We are dealing with a systematic failure in the Cleveland Police Department,” DeWine concluded. “Command failed. Communications failed. The system failed.”

After such an indictment, you would expect the department to do all it could to remedy such failings. And that should have prominently included communications. A test came with a phone call to 911 on Nov. 22.

Dispatcher: “Cleveland Police…”

Caller: “Hey, how are you?”

Dispatcher: “Good.”

Caller: “I’m sitting in the park… by the West Boulevard rapid transit station and there’s a guy and like a pistol, you know. It’s probably fake, but he’s like pointing it at everybody.”

Dispatcher: “And where are you at, sir?”

Caller: “I’m sitting in the park at West Cudell, West Boulevard by the West Boulevard rapid transit station.”
Dispatcher: “So, you’re at the rapid station. Are you are the rapid station?”

Caller: “No, I’m sitting across the street at the park.”

Dispatcher: “What’s the name of the park, Cudell?”

Caller: “Cudell, yes. The guy keeps pulling it in and out of his pan… it’s probably fake, but you know what, he’s scaring…

Dispatcher: “What does he look like?”

Caller: “He has a camouflage hat on.”

Dispatcher: “Is he black or white?”

Caller: “He has a gray, gray coat with black sleeves and gray pants on.”

Dispatcher: “Is he black or white?”

Caller: “I’m sorry?”

Dispatcher: “Is he black or white?”

Caller: “He’s black.”

Dispatcher: “He’s got a camo jacket and gray pants?

Caller: “No, he has a camo hat on. You know what that is?...”

Dispatcher: “Yeah.”

Caller: “…Desert storm. And his jacket is gray and it’s got black sleeves on it. He’s sitting on the swing right now. He’s pulling it out of his pants and pointing it at people. He’s probably a juvenile, you know?”

Silence.

Caller: “Hello?”

Dispatcher: “Do you have a gun?”

Caller: “No, I do no not. I’m getting ready to leave, but you know what, he’s right nearby, you know, the youth center or whatever and he’s pulling it in and out of his pants. I don’t know if it’s real or not.”

Dispatcher: “OK, we’ll send a car there, thank you.”

Caller: “Thank you.”

A car was indeed dispatched, with no mention that the suspect was possibly a juvenile and that the gun might be a toy.

Dispatcher: "In the park by the youth center, there’s a black male sitting on the swings. He’s wearing a camouflage hat, a gray jacket with black sleeves. He keeps pulling a gun out of his pants and pointing it at people.”

A surveillance video shows the radio car driving directly into the park, just feet from the youngster. A white rookie cop named Timothy Loehmann was in the passenger seat and police would later insist that he repeatedly instructed Tamir Rice through the lowered window to raise his hands.

If that is so, Loehmann must have been shouting that even as the car was rolling up, for two seconds pass before the startled Tamir is fatally shot. The police say he reached for the gun in his waistband.

And if that is so, Tamir may have been trying to show the cops his gun was just a toy, though there seems not to have been time even for that. He more likely was just moving reflexively as a youngster might if a radio car suddenly materialized right before him in the park, with a cop in the window shouting something a stunned young brain might not immediately register.

Whatever exactly transpired, the Cleveland Police Department had not learned some important lessons from the 2012 shooting about imagined danger and restraint.

However the department deals with Loehmann is not likely to be directly determined by his race any more than race directly determined how the department dealt with the aggrieved nine who have filed the lawsuit.

Race becomes a big factor when the press and the public go generic; white cops and black victims with little attention paid to the details and the individuals and the circumstances. The department responds as press becomes pressure.

In their lawsuit, the Cleveland Nine say an unnamed black cop received only “the 45-day cooling off period” of restricted duty in the gym after shooting a black suspect.

Had the media made an issue of the shooting, you can be all but certain that the cop in question would not have just done a little “gym time,” no matter what his race.

One white cop who is not part of the suit is Michael Brelo, who somehow fired 49 of the 137 bullets unleashed in 2012, reloading twice. He faces manslaughter charges and is now awaiting trial. The city of Cleveland recently reached a $3 million settlement with the Russell and Williams families.

On Saturday, relatives returned to the middle-school parking lot where Russell and Williams were killed and gathered with the family of Tamir Rice. Highway safety flares provided light as the clans joined by loss sought solace in prayer and song.

A report by the Cleveland Plain Dealer describes balloons being released into the night sky. Williams’s uncle, Walter Jackson, spoke to Tamir’s grandfather, J.J. Rice.

“You’re at the start, where we were two years ago,” the uncle said.

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THE NEW ALPHAS12.02.14
Norman Reedus on Motorcycles, Multitasking, And That Mid-Season Finale: “This Was A Rough One”
Some of the most fascinating people in today’s culture are distinguished not just by their craft, but also by their passions. We call them the New Alphas.

Spoiler Alert: Do not read if you haven't seen season five episode eight of The Walking Dead, “Coda”

For those of you still reeling from Sunday’s heart-crushing midseason finale of The Walking Dead, the man behind the show’s most popular and emblematic character has some advice that just might help. “Stay close to your loved ones and just tell them it’s all going to be okay,” says Norman Reedus, the onetime model and motorcycle mechanic who plays the crossbow-wielding Daryl Dixon, whose gut-wrenching farewell to Beth is still sending shockwaves across the Twitterverse. “Then think of all the new stuff you are going to get in the New Year. Think of all that good holiday fun you are going to have.”

Also, it may be a good time to remind yourself that such shocks as Beth’s demise are more or less what you signed up for when you started watching this show in the first place. “All our midseason finales are heavy for different reasons, but yes, this was a particularly rough one,” says Reedus, underplaying it just a touch. “That’s the nature of our show: whether you are killing somebody or somebody is trying to kill you, heavy things happen.”

Reedus— who admits spending his day job plumbing the emotional depths of surviving a zombie apocalypse “weighs on you a little bit”— has his own means of therapy. “I do my best thinking on a motorcycle,” says Reedus, 45, on the phone from his home in New York, where he arrived the day before Thanksgiving after the 13-plus hour ride from The Walking Dead’s Georgia set. “I’m able to decompress on a motorcycle. On a motorcycle, it’s a different kind of a vibe then anywhere else: you are wide open and it’s a feeling of freedom and isolation all at the same time. I get excited about things while I am on a motorcycle.”

Norman Reedus
It is also from the back of a bike that Reedus, who last year published his first volume of photography, The Sun’s Coming Up… Like a Big Bald Head, finds much of the inspiration for the art he creates away from the killing fields of The Walking Dead. “I did a whole show in Times Square of nothing but pictures of roadkill that I found on the street while I was riding to work in Georgia,” says Reedus, who prefers not to ride in the traffic of his home city. “I just found myself referring back to [The Walking Dead executive producer and special make-up effects supervisor] Greg Nicotero, and what he does [creating zombies]: you find the lost person behind the monster, and that’s what makes it scary and also sad. The more I did that, the more I started recognizing the roadkill wasn't just roadkill— it was once somebody’s cat.”

Reedus also finds plenty worth capturing among living subjects (he’s thinking his next show might be portraits), but as anyone familiar with his work could attest, his photography, like his acting gigs and most everything else Reedus finds himself drawn to, has a decidedly dark streak. He can’t help it, he says, he was born that way. “I have always sort of gravitated towards dark things, even as a kid I used to draw them,” says Reedus, who was born in Hollywood, Fla. but moved to L.A early on. “I think when you’re young and you are into dark things, it’s kind of fun to find something funny in it. With the fun, sometimes you can make something real that’s less scary, and you can laugh at it.”

While his photography may not necessarily serve as an escape from Daryl’s bleak landscape of walkers, the more he exists in that world, the more he feels compelled to create images of his real one, be them dark or otherwise. “I always thought I would do more than one thing at once,” he says. “All my life, I’ve always had a couple of things happening all at the same time. I don’t know why I’m like that, if it’s my lack of focus or I am just flighty, but I have always felt the need to do multiple things at the same time.”

He works in different disciplines, but that doesn't mean they don't feed into each other. “I think it started out as totally different things and as I get older they sort of blend into one thing,” says Reedus, who is also a painter. “How can I put this? Like, I feel like if you can understand piano and you can learn piano and you can understand tones and timing and rhythm and space, I feel like later on, you can use that to understand how to cook. You can learn flavors.”

Norman Reedus
Reedus, father to Mingus, his son with former partner Helena Christensen, takes this same restless, learning-as-you-go approach to parenthood as he does to creating art. “My son is very much his own person,” explains Reedus, whose son turned 15 this past October. “I am still kind of trying to figure out my stuff out and he is trying to figure his stuff out too, and it’s a very even-keeled combination of both of us on this road together. I don’t think he is a Mini-Me so much as we are both related and we are both very similar and we are both in the process trying to figure ourselves out.”

When he was Mingus’s age, he didn't have a clue what lay ahead, only that he wanted to go out searching for it. “I was only kind of serious about what’s around the corner and what’s over that horizon and the next,” he says. “My dad used to joke about it, that I used to always say, ‘Why? Why? Why?’ to everything. It was more like I wanted to discover more stuff. So I was always like looking for what’s around the corner.”

For some, Reedus’s latest project, a book of Daryl Dixon fan art called Thanks For All The Niceness, might smack of self-aggrandizement; for him, it’s further evidence of his seemingly bottomless curiosity and desire to connect. “I originally wanted to do it with art of every actor from the show, but I had to remove everybody but me in the book for life issues and so forth, so I did,” explains Reedus. “Then I thought, ‘Oh man, that’s kind of narcissistic.’ But then I’d already worked so hard on it with so many people for months and promised all these young artists that they would be published artists and all the money was going to charity, and couldn’t just back out. But when I started to put them all together, it became very little about me. It became more about the people and their artwork and their interpretation of Daryl. Some people made him scared and some people made him super tough, but it was really about them in the end and their interpretation.”

Fortunately for all of those fans and countless others, Daryl’s journey continues on, unlike Beth’s. “Hopefully, this chapter won’t end for me anytime soon,” says Reedus. Until that day comes, he’ll deal with the fragility of life on a show that regularly features losses as dramatic as the one that came Sunday by taking pictures, painting, riding, and always, always searching. “Sometimes you deal with fears and anxieties in ways that you don’t realize that you are dealing with them,” he says. “I feel like they’re sort of in the unsatisfied feeling that you get even when you are satisfied. Like, if I am taking a photograph, I can take a hundred pictures of the same still thing and still try to find different things in it. I can do the painting or whatever it is, and I’ll never feel like there is ever a time when I am ever truly done.”

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SUCCESS12.02.14
Quotes To Help You Conquer Your Day
Words from the wise on how to get started and persevere.
Experiencing a motivation deficit? Feeling some creative jetlag? Wondering where to even begin?

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LITERARY LIVES12.02.14
Ted Hughes’s Brother on Losing Sylvia Plath
In his memoir, Gerald Hughes recalls his brother’s famous love affair with the poet Sylvia Plath—and how her tragic end continued to haunt Ted.
Excerpted from Ted and I, copyright © 2012 by Gerald Hughes

After all the upbeat and happy letters and occasional phone calls we received from Ted and Sylvia, as well as from other members of the family, it was naturally extremely upsetting to hear about Ted and Sylvia’s separation in the autumn of 1962.

Barnes and Nobles.
I’d expressed our concern in a letter to Olwyn, and Ted wrote me a heartfelt letter from our parents’ home. In it he expressed his great admiration for Sylvia (‘in many ways the most gifted and capable and admirable woman I’ve ever met’). He went on to explain that the break-up was finally, in some ways, a relief. ‘All the business has been terrible—especially for Sylvia—but it was inevitable.’

Despite this, all our hopes had been that they would somehow get back together and resume a relatively normal family life with their very young children. So the dreadful news of Sylvia’s suicide in February 1963, which we learnt about from my parents, was a terrible shock—all the more so since, at that time, we had little knowledge of Sylvia’s emotional struggles. Of course, we could not then have read her journals, with their record of her fears and terrible nightmares, nor were we aware of her earlier suicide attempt when a student at Smith College.

Sylvia’s loss made us feel closer than ever to Ted and our family—even though we were at different ends of the world—as happens when sad times come. We looked for a way to come to England to see them all. Ted and my parents had never met our children, nor we his. At that time, though, my job as a rep for an Australian company made it impossible to leave Australia.

It was 1964 before I finally managed the trip. I went first to see Mom and Dad in Yorkshire, then to Court Green. Olwyn had come over from Paris in September 1963 to help with the children until Ted sorted things out. She expected to stay a month or two but ended up staying for two years, until October 1965. During that time, after a four-year job in Paris with theatre agents, and with Ted’s encouragement, Olwyn started her own literary agency, initially handling Ted, Jean Rhys, who lived nearby, and the poet Robert Nye. She also translated a French novel for the publisher Andre Deutsch while in Devon.

It was sad that my first visit to Court Green, which Sylvia had described so enthusiastically, should be after her demise. It was, indeed, as she had written, a lovely, well-proportioned house, led into by a wide expanse of lawn in the front and rows of apple trees. Idyllic.

It was during this visit that Ted talked to me about Sylvia’s suicide and the events leading up to it. Only now, when we were able to talk frankly and at length, did I come to realize how profoundly it had affected him. Her death and the circumstances surrounding it continued to haunt him, and I found him in a poor state, mentally and physically: he complained of feeling unwell, which was very unlike him. Dad, too, was in a terrible state, and my mother’s ill health only contributed to the general mood.

From Ted, among other things, I heard how Sylvia had become more and more worried, even paranoid, about her work, particularly her forthcoming and deeply personal book The Bell Jar—how it would be received and whether it would sell. Her nervousness about its content made her decide to publish it under a pseudonym, for reasons that would later become clear. Again and again Ted had tried to reassure her, but her anxieties grew, and the emotional tension between them and the increasing marital strains reached an unbearable pitch. The situation was inflamed by Sylvia’s awareness that Ted had become infatuated with another woman, Assia Wevill.

Sylvia insisted that Ted move out and he complied, going to stay in London. At the time he hoped and believed it would be a temporary arrangement, thinking that being separated from him would give Sylvia space to deal with the emotional turmoil she was going through—and he too would have time and clam in which to refocus and to work. He kept in constant touch with Sylvia and the children, visiting Court Green, and when Sylvia decided she didn’t want to spend the long winter alone in Devon, he helped her with the money to lease a London flat.

He continued to see them regularly, and although Sylvia talked of divorce, Ted balked at this, believing they could get back together. He missed the children terribly, and he missed Sylvia. In one sense, he was right about giving her space, since it was during this period that she wrote her most famous poems. However, as she feared, The Bell Jar appeared to indifferent notices and the launch—which Ted attended—was rather low-key.

Ted told me how panicky he had become about Sylvia’s mental state as the months went by, and particularly about her reliance on certain medication she had been prescribed by an American doctor, which could make her vulnerable to suicidal tendencies. He worried that she might be taking this medication alongside that prescribed by her British doctors—as indeed she was—and that a combination of the two might be lethal.

It was a painful conversation, Ted talking passionately about the circumstances surrounding Sylvia’s actual suicide, the failure of someone to get there in time, the fact that he believed she had wanted to be rescued.

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READ THIS.list
The Secret To Tracking Ebola? Sewers
by Wudan Yan
Cops Fire 137 Shots, Cry Victim
by Michael Daly
New Alpha: Walking Dead's Norman Reedus
from The New Alphas
Quotes To Help You Conquer Your Day
by The Daily Beast Video
Ted Hughes’s Brother On Losing Sylvia
by Gerald Hughes
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