February 20, 2016

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Health February 20, 2016

Zika Spike Overwhelms Colombia Doctors

3:50

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The spread of Zika is taxing Colombia’s already over-burdened health care system.

Transcript

LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

Zika is on the rise in Colombia. According to new figures just released, more than 37,000 people have been sickened by the virus since an outbreak began there last fall. For most people, Zika symptoms are mild, but the uptick is worrying because the virus could be linked to complications like birth defects and a rare neurological condition that can cause temporary paralysis. It’s called Guillain-Barre syndrome. NPR’s Nurith Aizenman is in Colombia in a place that’s seen a dramatic number of Zika infections. Good morning, Nurith.

NURITH AIZENMAN, BYLINE: Good morning.

WERTHEIMER: Let’s talk first about Guillain-Barre.

AIZENMAN: Yeah. So as you just said, Linda, Guillain-Barre, it’s a condition that affects your neurological system. Basically, your immune system attacks your nerves, and in a lot of cases, it can be really severe. People can be fully paralyzed for weeks. They have to be on breathing machines. It can take you months to recover, and some people never walk again. Normally, it’s extremely rare, but people here are really worried because there’s been this dramatic surge in cases since the Zika outbreak began. And this is happening in a lot of the countries where the Zika outbreak is happening. It’s in Brazil, in El Salvador, Venezuela. I’m in the city called Cucuta, and I visited a couple of ICUs here, including one at the main hospital. I talked to a neurologist named Jairo Lizarazo. Here he is.

JAIRO LIZARAZO: (Foreign language spoken).

AIZENMAN: He’s saying that around the end of January they suddenly started to get a lot of cases, and now they’re seeing about a case every day – a new case every day. Across Colombia, they’ve seen almost a hundred cases since last fall, which is just way more than usual.

WERTHEIMER: Do we know for sure that Guillain-Barre is linked to Zika virus?

AIZENMAN: It’s an open question. It’s hard to tell if someone has had Zika unless you test them right away while they still an active infection, but the Guillain-Barre symptoms tend to develop a while afterwards. And even if someone has had Zika, you’ve got to prove it wasn’t just a coincidence that they then developed Guillain-Barre. So people here, including Dr. Lizarazo who we just heard from, are launching studies to look into this, but there are no firm answers yet.

WERTHEIMER: OK. What about microcephaly, babies born with abnormally small heads? What is happening with that in Colombia?

AIZENMAN: It’s definitely a concern. The latest numbers are that about 6,300 pregnant women in Colombia are suspected to have fallen sick with Zika. So far, there haven’t been any of those babies born with microcephaly like we saw – we’ve seen in Brazil. But that said, if you think about the time wave of the Zika epidemic, it hit Brazil first. The numbers in Colombia didn’t really start swelling until late last year.

And researchers suspect that Zika may cause these birth defects if the woman is infected in her first trimester. So based on that timing, officials we’ve spoken with say they would expect that if Zika is causing microcephaly it would be several more months before we’d see these cases in Colombia. So, for now, they’re monitoring pregnant women who’ve had Zika. They’re going to run a very large study in cooperation with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, and Colombia is seen as a key to trying to prove a link between birth defects and Zika.

WERTHEIMER: We don’t have too much time left, but let me ask you how the health care system in Colombia is holding up.

AIZENMAN: There are a lot of dedicated and excellent doctors here, but from what I’ve seen, the system is already feeling the strain. I’ve gone to several clinics where they’re asking pregnant women to come in for more tests. And these Guillain-Barre cases are really expensive. One of the main treatments for the disease requires you to clean out the blood – antibodies from the blood. It’s really costly and here is Dr. Lizarazo again, the neurologist from the hospital in Cucuta.

LIZARAZO: (Foreign language spoken).

AIZENMAN: He’s saying there’s already a deficit of ICU beds, and with more Guillain-Barre, it’s going to be really tough.

WERTHEIMER: NPR’s global health correspondent Nurith Aizenman, thank you very much.

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Sports February 20, 2016

The Week In Sports

3:57

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A review of the week in sports, including an update on the Golden State Warriors, baseball’s reawakening, and a football player’s retirement announcement… on horseback.

Transcript

LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

It’s time for sports.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

WERTHEIMER: NPR’s sports correspondent Tom Goldman is still reeling from last night’s Warriors game.

Good morning, Tom. How are you holding up?

TOM GOLDMAN, BYLINE: Reeling.

WERTHEIMER: (Laughter) Now we’ve gotten used to the NBA’s Golden State Warriors being involved in a rout. But last night, it was Golden State on the losing end. What happened?

GOLDMAN: The Portland Trail Blazers and guard Damian Lillard happened. The Blazers pounded Golden State 137-105. That is a pounding.

Lillard is a two-time All-Star, but he wasn’t chosen for last Sunday’s All-Star Game. Against the Warriors, he played like a man snubbed. He had a career-high 51 points. He outdueled Golden State’s reigning league MVP Steph Curry. Portland’s defense forced Golden State into a ton of turnovers, and a Blazers team people were starting to notice before the All-Star break suddenly has everyone’s attention, at least today.

WERTHEIMER: The Warriors do still have a pretty good record. So how are you – what do you think their chances are to have the greatest regular-season record in NBA history as we have assumed they would?

GOLDMAN: Yeah. Well, 48-5, which is what they are now, isn’t bad. But every loss is significant when you’re trying to beat the Chicago Bulls’ record of 72-10. There are 29 games left. Now, all of the Warriors’ losses have been on the road. And they still have a string of tough road games after Portland, starting tonight against the LA Clippers and then against Miami, Atlanta, Oklahoma City. This long, coast-to-coast road trip could tell us a lot about whether Golden State can break the record.

WERTHEIMER: On from basketball to baseball, baseball fans have been waiting for this week all winter. Teams are reporting to spring training camps. And preseason reports are saying the Cubs are great. But of course, that’s on paper. What are you thinking?

GOLDMAN: (Laughter) I’m thinking preseason reports are notoriously wrong. You can look it up. It’s incredibly hard to predict a winner in February.

But yes, on paper, the Cubs look really good. They made it to the National League Championship Series last season and then appeared to get better. They signed several top players from other teams. They have everything. They’ve got great pitching, hitting, power, speed – a great front office, a great manager in Joe Maddon.

But remember, Linda. It’s the Cubs.

WERTHEIMER: (Laughter).

GOLDMAN: They haven’t won the World Series since 1908. To be a Cubs fan is to wait for things to go wrong (laughter).

WERTHEIMER: Now, some seasons are just starting now, of course. But other players are announcing their retirement now, specifically, Jared Allen of the Carolina Panthers. Yes?

GOLDMAN: Yeah. You know, it’s so hard for many top athletes to retire gracefully – or even with humor – and Jared Allen did both this week. He’s the defensive lineman who entertained fans with his play and his enthusiasm. He’d celebrate tackling quarterbacks by pretending to rope a calf. He grew up on a ranch.

So this week, he offered a fitting video goodbye wearing a cowboy hat, a thick winter jacket and sitting on a horse. He totally looked like a cowboy. Here’s what he said.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

JARED ALLEN: Well, everyone, I just want to say thank you for an amazing 12-year career. This was the part where I was going to ride off into the sunset. But seeing how there’s no sunset, I’m just going to ride off.

(SOUNDBITE OF HORSE GALLOPING)

WERTHEIMER: (Laughter).

GOLDMAN: (Laughter) So he galloped off on a cloudy day. And Linda, wouldn’t it be great to have an exit like that?

WERTHEIMER: NPR’s Tom Goldman. Thank you, Tom.

GOLDMAN: You’re welcome.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.

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Business February 20, 2016

Expensive Journals Drive Academics To Break Copyright Law

3:48

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A new pirate website called Sci-Hub allows free access to academic journals behind paywalls. Heather Joseph, an advocate for legal open access, explains the situation to Linda Wertheimer.

Transcript

LINDA WERTHEIMER, HOST:

University libraries have been forced to cut back on the number of academic journals that they subscribe to because it has become too expensive. Some faculty are now soliciting illegal copies of articles from peers at other institutions. Others are pulling down articles from the self-described pirate website called Sci-Hub. It’s based in Russia and claims to have made nearly 50 million articles available for free in violation of international copyright law. I’m joined now by Heather Joseph, who’s been following this development. Her organization is called SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. The group advocates for legal open access to academic journals. Ms. Joseph, thank you very much for joining us.

HEATHER JOSEPH: Thank you for having me.

WERTHEIMER: So how do the academic journals that are charging a lot of money for what – for their subscriptions, what is their justification?

JOSEPH: Well, the justification I think is a good one for nonprofit organizations like Scholarly Societies that really do operate on pretty much a cost recovery model. The commercial ventures, though, that have the profit margins in the 30 and 40 percent range, there really is no justification. They’re profit-maximizing businesses, which is fine. The question is, should such businesses be built around information that’s vital to the public’s good and the public’s health?

WERTHEIMER: When these scholars do articles, who gets – do they get any of that money?

JOSEPH: They’re unpaid. The authors of these articles traditionally contribute the work of writing the articles, the work of reviewing and verifying the information, and they’re not paid.

WERTHEIMER: I can see why universities might feel that they were paying too much.

JOSEPH: Yes, indeed.

WERTHEIMER: So now we have the pirate website Sci-Hub, which provides free access to journals. What has been the reaction to this in the academy?

JOSEPH: Well, I think researchers take for granted that they’re – they’ve been forced into a system of workarounds to try to get access to the articles that they need to do their research. Typically, a researcher will have legal access to only between 50 and 70 percent of the articles that they need to do their work. So I think this database, Sci-Hub, was just another step in a process that researchers have sadly become used to doing.

WERTHEIMER: It’s not just academics. We might all decide that we need to pull up a paper on, say – I mean, something that we all do every day is look up any diseases we are afraid we might have.

JOSEPH: That’s exactly right. I think that’s first and foremost the value you can see immediately. Whenever you’re diagnosed or a family member is diagnosed with an illness, we just – we go to the web, and we want the latest verified information. And unfortunately, most of the articles that we’ll run into will have a pay wall that will say, you need to pay $10, $15, $20, even $30 for an individual view of an article.

WERTHEIMER: I understand you have some unhappy personal experience of this.

JOSEPH: Actually, my son has Type 1 juvenile diabetes. So when he was diagnosed, of course, the first thing that I did when we got home from the hospital was try to find information that would keep him safe through the night. And I think it was my personal eye-opening experience as to just how expensive it was to try to get basic scientific information, which, by the way, much of it was funded by the NIH, institutions that my tax dollars have supported the research. So I was sort of doubly exercised over this issue of wanting to provide better, open, equitable access to this information.

WERTHEIMER: Heather Joseph, she is with the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, SPARC. Thank you very much.

JOSEPH: Thank you for having me.

Copyright © 2016 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service – if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers.