Arete

The only two diseases ever eradicated globally are smallpox and rinderpest. Polio is close. All have been eradicated via vaccination campaigns. I'm unsure of how climate change will result in the reintroduction of these diseases - care to clarify? While there is genuine controversy over the maintenance of live Variola strains for research, it should be noted that modified poxviruses are some of the most promising for oncolytic viral therapy in clinical trial.We don't keep smallpox cultures just for posterity, they can be used to save lives. Since it's been done before, I see no reason why sterilizing vaccines cannot be used to eradicate infectious diseases in the future. You may or may not get cancer from breathing second hand smoke - both are risk factors. However you are correct in that they aren't entirely analogous - one is an environmental pollutant, the other is an infectious agent. It should be noted that the primary reasons vaccines work is that they reduce the rate of susceptible hosts in a population - the ultimate agent of protection is the fact that the chances of encountering a carrier for a disease are drastically reduced, to the point where the agent cannot be transmitted from a terminal host and goes extinct in the population. Also, for a sterilizing vaccine like MMR, protection is complete - unless an underlying condition (e.g. immunodeficincy) prevents an immune response to the vaccine from mounting (about 3% of the population for MMR), a vaccinated individual cannot be a carrier. In the smoking case, you elevate the risk of cancer for those around you by increasing exposure to a carcinogenic pollutant. For vaccines, you increase the risk of infection for those around you by increasing the incidence of susceptible hosts in a given population. I agree with legislation mitigating the overall population risk in both scenarios. An aside, a case can be made against non-sterilizing vaccines (i.e. vaccines which reduce the impact of an infection, but not necessarily the risk of infection)such as those in development for malaria and HIV, in that pathogens generally evolve in a trade off between transmission and virulence, and by artificially lowering the costs to the pathogen of virulence, we allow for the evolution of a more virulent pathogen to evolve which causes more serious disease in unvaccinated individuals. https://www.nature.com/articles/414751a. However, this argument does not apply to sterilizing vaccines.

1) For sterilizing vaccines like MMR, a minimum compliance rate required to eradicate disease, especially in the last "mile" (i.e. when the disease is persistent at very low incidence rates) is very high e.g. >99% https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3720046/ This means that even extremely low rates of non-compliance increase the disease burden on the population as a whole. We need assess our endgame with regards to vaccination - is it a maintenance program that we continue indefinitely, or is the goal disease eradication? If it's the latter compliance enforcement may be necessary. 2) A proportion of the population is immunocompromised such that they either cannot be vaccinated (e.g. HIV patients, selective IgA patients, etc) or have had their immunity eroded (e.g. chemotherapy patients, organ transplant recipients, etc). These are the people most at risk due to a transmissible infection. If we are comparing to smoking, it IS legislated against in instances where it affects others - in public buildings, restaurants, on planes, etc. The difference of course being that one can decide not to smoke for a period of time, but one cannot switch on or off their vaccine acquired immunity. So do we legislate people who choose not to vaccinate out of public spaces permanently, or do we legislate to enforce compliance?

1) absolutely not. 2) what makes anyone think humans are the only animal that engages in sex outside of pure reproduction?

Honestly, unless you're immunocompromised, I wouldn't lose any sleep over it.

Well yes. A third of the human population also has golden staph living in their noses. For a normal, healthy adult chance encounters with opportunistic pathogens has a negligible infection risk. The main issue is that when you deliberately grow one of these opportunistic pathogens in a culture, you end up with many many magnitudes more than you would ever encounter in nature, thus the risk of infection from a culture of a pathogen is many times greater than that of a chance encounter with bacteria in the environment.

Not necessarily - it's an oxidase positive bacterium found ubiquitously in soil and water. It has a propensity to form biofilms, colonize man made environments and notorious for being multidrug resistant due to efflux upregulation (main reason I wouldn't want a school kid streak plating for it on the family's kitchen table) . The biofilm in a drain trap is simply one of the places I'd just about guarantee you'll be able to culture it from.

Ok, phew. Unscrew the trap of your bathroom or kitchen sink, swab the biofilm in the pipe with a cotton bud and streak plate it. PSA for those reading along, don't try this if you don't have a suitable lab.

I am a professor whose lab works on, amongst other things, field isolated Pseudomonas aeruginosa . It is classified as a Biosafety level 2 pathogen. You should only be culturing it in a BSL2 approved lab with a class A2 biosafety hood. Please tell me you're not trying to do it at home, right? Is this a high school or college project?

$7.7 billion (22%) proposed cut to the NIH $1.2 billion (17%) proposed cut to the CDC That's a pretty huge, steamy crap on the whole "eliminating diseases" flippancy.

Any President who supports the completely debunked Wakefield link between the MMR vaccine and autism is not pro science. Any president who wants to increase graduate student income tax burden by 400% is not pro science. Any president who wants to decimate science funding is not pro science. Any president who dissolves the DoJ National commission on forensic science is not pro science. Any president blocks public access to scientific data is no pro science. Trump is the most anti science president in recent history. His own party and appropriations committee openly defies him to support science.

Yeah you did, in post #5, so subsequent calls of "off topic" would seem to be pretty disingenuous.

You are correct in that is the sitation, but incorrect in your assesment that quid pro quo demands for sex are not sexual harrassment/assault. Quid pro quo sexual demands are, by legal definition, sexual harassment. Sexual acts resulting from those demands are by legal definition, sexual assault/rape.

FTFY

There are legal definitions for what constitutes harassment, rape and sexual assault. What is ethical/unethical behavior is up for opinion and discussion - sure. The above situation you described would not be rape by a legal definition (at least in the US). Whether or not it was unethical would depend on the circumstances.

The problem with your position, as has been pointed out, is that women are systematically, and routinely not believed and retaliated against for coming forward as victims of sexual assault. Your position places them in a catch 22 - come forward and you may (or even are likely to be) dismissed and retaliated against. We even have a post in this thread calling victims of quid pro quo sexual assault "whores". Stay quiet, and you'll be shamed for not coming forward and possibly preventing the abuser from attacking others. Before we can obligate both male and female victims of sexuall assault to come forward, we need to ensure that a safe and supporting environment exists to protect them from vilification and retaliation. We aren't at that place yet, but we, as a society are getting better - which is why we are seeing more Bill O'Rileys, Harvey Weinsteins and Bill Cosbys being exposed and punished for this behavior. I think it's important to remember that the person guilty of a crime is the attacker, not the victims and approach these situations accordingly.

You are wrong. As I posted earlier, quid pro quo demands for sexual favors are sexual harassment and any resulting sexual interaction is sexual assault/rape, by legal definition. Demanding sexual favors in return for career advancement is very specifically and very clearly defined, legally, as sexual harassment. It's absolutely unequivocal. The earth is round, water is wet, and demanding sex in return for a favor in a professional setting is sexual harassment.

Legally quid pro quo sexual harassment and sexual extortion are both crimes - and unwanted intercourse as a result of both is considered rape, so yes, it is. As for the responsibility to report sexual assault - women have historically and still suffer significant negative consequences when reporting sexual assault, especially by an authority figure: "Despite widespread rape reform laws that have been implemented in this country, victims of rape still face the risk of receiving social stigma should they decide to make their victimization known to authorities" http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0093854893020003003 "A few examples from the DOJ report on Baltimore’s police department: Officers routinely questioned sex crime victims in a way that put the blame on the victims themselves, like suggesting they were responsible. Detectives would ask “Why are you messing up that guy’s life?” and suggest the victims were lying by not reporting the assault immediately. A prosecutor handling a sexual assault case wrote in an email to a BPD officer that the woman who reported the crime was a “conniving little whore,” and the cop responded “Lmao! I feel the same.” Detectives made “minimal to no effort to locate, identify, interrogate, or investigate suspects,” the DOJ said. BPD sex crimes unit officials would complain that all of the sexual assault reports were false, saying at a social event, “In homicide, there are real victims; all our cases are bullshit.”https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3009376/BPD-Findings-Report-FINAL.pdf Given the prevalence of this kind of response, both by society and law enforcement to victims of sexual assault, I would say it's rather obvious why a person might not report it, and I think it's pretty disgusting to place any blame on prior victims. The guilty party is the one committing the assault - that should be pretty uncontroversial.

You can calculate the inbreeding coefficient of any individual, assuming pedigree is known.

It does, and such studies have been amassing for at least the past two decades. Here's a study quantifying the natural and anthropogenic components of climate change from 1999: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v397/n6721/abs/397688a0.html?foxtrotcallback=true and another from 1992: https://www.osti.gov/scitech/biblio/6970221 A Google scholar search reveals about 560,000 hits for the search term "natural vs anthropogenic climate change factors".

There are literally thousands of empirical studies demonstrating that at the majority of observed contemporary climate change is caused by human activity. http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048002 http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024

If you live in an environment where starvation is not a significant risk, it's irrelevant.

The scientific article cited is misinterpreted. The study tests the hypothesis that attraction, on terms of male preference for female body type, is environmentally inducible - concluding that it is. The study shows that men under stress prefer heavier set women than men not under stress, not that men who marry heavier set women are "happier" than men who marry slighter women, as the article suggests. This is pretty uncontroversial in terms of evolution - in times of uncertainty, increased resource provision means lower infant mortality. Women with higher adipose storage will have lower infant mortality rates than women with less when resources are limited.

Evolution does not necessarily equal speciation. The question you are asking is answered by the fundamentals of neutral theory. Divergence, in the absence of divergent selection proceeds scholastically at a rate of 4Ne x u, where Ne is effective population size and u is the mutation rate. See previous link. The goal of the long term experiment was to examine neutral rates of evolution, not adaptation in the face of selective pressures, although spin off experiments have done that. Another major caveat is that no one really has a good definition of what a bacterial "species" is - for e.g. Shigella and E. coli are effectively the same thing.

It does? Again the populations are raised in as neutral conditions as as possible. Why do you expect "speciation" in 60,00 generations under neutrality? Mathematically, it would not be plausible in the absence of divergent selection.