The PANDAS controversies

December 22nd, 2011

We're not talking about this kind of Panda

The more I read about the relatively new syndrome PANDAS, Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcus, the more I realize how complex the issues are that surround it. We appear to be entering a new field of medicine, one that holds enormous potential for unlocking the root causes of baffling problems in neurology and psychiatry

The story starts in the mid 1990s when Dr. Susan Swedo, now Chief of the National Institute of Mental Health's (NIMH)  Pediatrics & Developmental Neuroscience Branch , reported that childhood obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) may sometimes be triggered by a strep infection.  OCD may involve compulsive handwashing, twenty or thirty times a day; it can manifest itself as a need to have things "just so" in order to relieve anxiety, repeating and checking behavior, counting and arranging objects or clothing, hoarding, praying, reading a section of a story over and over again.

Some of these youngsters also have tics, involuntary movement disorders. Another subset just has tics, but no OCD.

A moving portrait of a child who fits this profile was published in the Los Angeles Times early this month. The boy involved wa a normal eleven-year-old sixth grader until he developed a strep throat. Then his behavior altered to the point where daily life seemed totally changed; he became obsessed with being clean  and afraid of germs to the point where he was unable to go back to school.

Increasingly these diseases and perhaps others are being linked by some eminent researchers to strep infections. A senior immunologist at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine thinks the mechanism of PANDAS involves antibodies, released in response to a strep infection, that can bind to brain cells and cause the release of dopamine, a brain chemical which in excess, may be linked to OCD and tics. The diagnosis, at the moment, is strictly clinical; there is no lab test to confirm that a child has PANDAS.

One form of OCD involves repetitive handwashing

Many youngsters with OCD and/or tics don't appear to have this strep-related syndrome and some equally prominent academic physicians feel kids can have a mental health/neurological disorder first and just have it exacerbated by strep throat or other infections. Others want to treat the most severely affected of these children with antibiotics even if they don't have an active strep infection.

The NIMH makes the point that these children, as opposed to others with OCD and/or tics, have an abrupt worsening of their symptoms when they have a strep infection. They then will have a slowly improving course after a few weeks or months.

The guidelines are admittedly vague; NIMH says PANDAS can be "identified after two or three episodes of OCD or tics that occur in conjunction with strep infection."

A senior Harvard professor of psychiatry who is the head of the International OCD Foundation's scientific advisory board has been quoted as saying the portion of OCD linked to PANDAS is "exceedingly common."

Is this the tip of an iceberg of neuropsychiatric problems linked to infections? Only time and lots of research will tell.


Tags: , , , ,
Posted in bacterial infections, National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Neuropsychiatric disorders, OCD, PANDAS, scientific controversies, strep. throat, streptococcus, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Don't you need a disaster preparedness plan?

December 17th, 2011

Trouble coming this way

When my wife and I were active duty Air Force medical officers we participated in disaster exercises and when I became one of the senior staff at various places I helped plan some of those drills. After we retired our only effort along those lines was accumulating a small supply of food and a few jugs of water. That was ten years ago and obviously the stock needed to be rotated or used on a regular basis, but it hasn't been.

From 1988 to 1991 I commanded a 150-bed Air Force hospital in Wichita Falls, Texas. We met with the local civilian disaster planning group for their yearly event. They were even better prepared than those of us in the military and, when I asked why, told me of the triple tornado that had merged and ripped though their city ten years before, an April 1978 event called Terrible Tuesday.

We lived on Keesler Air Force base in Biloxi, Mississippi next and I was the commander of a 325-bed medical center. During our two years there three hurricanes headed our way. Two turned away well out in the Gulf; one didn't until six hours away. By then I had called in Air Force planes and evacuated my patients.

Recently four friends told me of incidents where they or their  adult children were without power for four to nine days. One lived in Chicago, and having three young children wanted to be ready for a contingency. She put a grill in her fireplace for roasting marshmallows...or anything else. When a Midwestern snow storm took down power lines, leaving her without electricity for six days, she was prepared.

this could be the start of your emergency supply kit

After reflecting on these episodes, I dug out the old disaster file I once had used, found the Emergency Food in a Nutshell book a writer friend had given me, and started compiling a list of things we'd need. I've already purchased a few, high-priority items and stored them. I emailed a letter on the subject to nearly fifty friends; ten have already replied with suggestions.

Then I talked with another writer who suggested  I send a request out for my blog readers to cogitate on what they'd think of accumulating/buying.

Do we stay or leave?

When I have input from a variety of of you, I'll add items to my own list, send a copy of the updated version to each person who has contributed and then, hopefully,  publish an article with the list included.

Depending on where you live, you may face the potential threat of an earthquake, tornado, flood or hurricane. In 2003 great swatches of the Northeast portion of the United States lost electrical power. Potentially a disaster could be man-made. You may be evacuated to safety or you could be stuck in your home for weeks or even longer.

So let me know, if you want to join in this endeavor, what you'd want to have for a "very rainy day" or week or month.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in disaster preparedness, earthquakes, emergency supplies, floods, natural disasters, power loss, tornado | No Comments »

Now we have PANDAS in the United States...unfortunately

December 14th, 2011

Those nodes are swollen

Until today I thought Pandas were black and white bears found in zoos or in small numbers in parts of China. Then I read a Wall Street Journal article titled "Does Strep Throat Trigger Serious Ills?" The concept being discussed was that of PANDAS or Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcus. I subsequently found a National Institutue of Mental Health (NIMH), article online about this unfamiliar, relatively new and bizarre condition in which children get neurological problems caused or flared by a streptococcal infection.

Let's begin this two-post discussion with an overview of strep throat, a bacterial infection most commonly seen in children between the ages of 5 and 15. Younger kids can certainly get this disease as can adults, but the typical kid in school has strep throat several times a year. It's important to realize that most (75-80%) sore throats in children aren't bacterial in origin, but if they are caused by streptococcal infection they can lead to severe consequences.

Among those are rheumatic fever with its attendant heart valve consequences and, less frequently, a significant kidney sequela, post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis (inflammation of the tiny filtering blood vessels in the kidneys). Both of these are seen worldwide with considerable frequency, but are much less common in the United States than in years past.

Why is that? Well, most of us who have healthcare (and I know that's far from all of us), would take our children to the pediatrician/family practice physician promptly if they had sudden onset of fever with a severe sore and red throat,  swollen lymph nodes in the neck and trouble swallowing (or even some of those). The doc would do a rapid strep test using a swab similar to that done for a throat culture and if that were positive prescribe antibiotics. If it was negative (it can be in about 5% of cases of strep throat, AKA strep pharyngitis), but the presentation and/or exam was suspicious, the physician would do a throat culture.

Those complications I mentioned are relatively rare. When they do occur they're due to an autoimmune reaction; that means the antibodies we produce to help fight the streptococcus can also, in some instances, attack our own tissues.. The theory behind that is called "molecular mimicry," a fancy way to say our heart valve, kidney, joint or brain tissue may have proteins that somehow resemble those of the bacterial cell wall.

after this you get a lollipop

There a PubMed Health review on treating strep throat, at least that caused by the bad kind of streptococcal bacteria. Their scientific name is group A beta-hemolytic strep sometimes termed GABHS. PubMed, by the way, comes from the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Library of Medicine and prints very solid material that I think you can rely on.

They looked at a series of articles on how best to treat strep throat, 17 trials with over 5,300 subjects, and concluded that good old-fashioned penicillin should be the first choice. It's cheap and no antibiotic resistance in GABHS has ever been documented. So unless you or your child have had an allergic reaction to penicillin, that's the drug your doc will likely use.

We'll get back to PANDAS next post.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Neuropsychiatric disorders, OCD, PANDAS, post-streptococcal glomerulonephritis, rheumatic fever, strep. throat | No Comments »

What's worse than TBI?

December 9th, 2011

play today, pay tomorrow?

In my last post I wrote about the immediate risk to our youngsters, that of traumatic brain injury (TBI). Now I'd like to move on to an even grimmer issue, much more severe and long-lasting brain damage that's also trauma-associated. We've heard of professional football players developing personality changes, then more severe neurological problems; most recently I read of a professional hockey player who had similar issues.

So I found the Boston Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy (that term translates as "disease, damage or malfunction of the brain."), and read one of their major publications on what is called Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy   (CTE). Trust me, most of the medical jargon it uses is tough even for a Internal Medicine subspecialist. It was published in a journal I've never heard of, J Neuropathol Exp Neurol, but is very well written and, in addition to detailing the brain changes in 48 cases of CTE, provides an excellent background discussion of the entity. Ninety percent of the neuropathological confirmed cases of CTE were in athletes.

I remembered a story in 2009 of a 26 year old Cincinnati Bengals receiver who had died after falling out of a pickup truck during a domestic quarrel, reviewed the recent New York Times piece on a 260+ pound NHL "enforcer" who died of a combined alcohol and painkiller overdose and found another Times article, this one from May of 2011, about a former Chicago Bears defensive back who had committed suicide and donated his brain to the Boston research center. All three had CTE.

That article said about two dozen retired NFL players were eventually found to have this disease; the research article mentions that over one-sixth of those having repetitive brain injuries called concussion or mild TBI eventually will go on to have CTE .

But we're not just speaking of football players or hockey players. Professional wrestlers, soccer players, domestic abuse victims, military veterans, horseback riders, seizure victims, head bangers as well as boxers and hard-form martial arts participants may well have similar recurring brain trauma and potentially could go on to CTE.

It's time to study their brains, hopefully before it's too late.

The NFL donated $1 million in 2010 to CSTE, the Boston University research group; researchers at the center have lined up 100 former players  to try to find ways to diagnose the condition during life and more than 250 active and retired NFL players have agreed to donate their brains and spinal cords to the CSTE.

Nearly 100 are suing the league over the issue of player safety, saying the NFL has down-played the concussion problem to give fans more action. A knowledgeable friend told me the NHL allows bare-fisted fights between its enforcers and others to go on for roughly fifteen seconds; he said the audience loves the brutality.

Bread and circuses were a way to keep the Roman populace from revolting. Why are we emulating them?

 

 

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), concussion, Exercise possibilities, Sports-related brain injuries, Traumatic brain injury (TBI) | No Comments »

It goes far beyond football, boxing and hockey

December 7th, 2011

The brain is vulnerable to trauma

I feel like I've opened the proverbial can of worms, finding, in this case, a topic that keeps expanding. I started with reading an article in The New York Times about the death of a professional hockey player, but I quickly delved into the medical literature.

I've spent much of the day reading article after article on traumatic brain injury  (TBI), which can be mild or severe, and another entity called chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE, one that's frequently been in the news over the last two years. Let's start with TBI. I'll be writing about teens and younger kids. I'll deal with CTE in another post focused on adults.

A Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)  report in the most recent edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association reviewed nonfatal TBI related to either sports or recreational activities in kids age 19  or younger. The numbers involved were staggering, nearly 175,000 per year being seen in Emergency Departments (EDs).

A large majority of those sports and recreation-related TBI ED visits were by boys and the annual total of those ED trips increased markedly during that nine-year time frame. They were injured biking, playing football, soccer, basketball or while engaging in miscellaneous playground activities. They went to the ED in smaller numbers for injuries suffered in many other activities, including horseback riding, ice skating, ATV riding, tobogganing and even golfing (here the injuries included those related to golf carts). Surprisingly, skateboarding accounted for only a fourth of the ED visits for biking and football accidents and TBI was less frequently seen.

A helmet is a good start

As my wife and I drive around town, we often see college students riding their bikes at night while helmet-less and light-less. I fear for their brains.

There's another, less well-accepted entity, so-called "Second Impact Syndrome." I read an article about this in a February 2009 article by two authors on the faculty of the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine. In this scenario athletes who've had a TBI then have a second brain injury when they go back to playing their sport far too quickly. The initial injury may have been relatively mild; the recurrent trauma may kill them in a matter of minutes.

Another review of this  syndrome said 94 catastrophic head injuries had been reported in American high school and college football players in a 13-year time frame, 92 in high schoolers.  Seven of ten had a prior concussion in the same football season; over a third played with continuing symptoms.

This speaks to the crucial question of when an athlete (or a bike or horseback rider) who has suffered TBI should return to their sport/activity. Last night I called a younger friend who had been bucked off his spooked mare and suffered a concussion eight days ago. He was still having headaches and agreed with me that it was far too soon to get back on his horse.

A new CDC program called Heads Up offers TBI guidelines for coaches, parents and physicians.

 

 

 

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), concussion, Exercise possibilities, medically-oriented background info, mental health issues, physician initiatives, Sports-related brain injuries, Traumatic brain injury (TBI) | 1 Comment »

So is it your thyroid after all?

November 30th, 2011

Is this woman depressed, hypothyroid or both?

On November 21, 2011, The New York Times had an article entitled “For Some, Psychiatric Trouble May Start in Thyroid." As a mental health therapist who is hypothyroid, my wife has a particular interest in this subject and pointed out the article for me.

The premise, put forth by Dr. Russell Joffe, a New York psychiatrist, and a group of his professional peers, is that subclinical hypothyroidism may play a significant role in depression. A Brown University professor of psychiatry and human behavior also commented on this connection asking, “Is there an underlying thyroid problem that causes psychiatric symptoms, or is it the other way around?

From the endocrinology side, Dr. James Hennessey, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medcsl Center in Boston, noted "Psychiatric symptoms can be vague, subtle and high individual."

A study, published five years ago by Chinese researchers, gave six months worth of  thyroid hormone replacement therapy (see links below for the NIH's info sheet on this medication, levothryroxine and other info from MedicineNet.com), to patients with subclinical hypothyroidism and found improvements in brain scans, memory and executive functions.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0000684/#

http://www.medicinenet.com/levothyroxine-oral/article.htm

sketch of the thyroid gland

So how is this condition diagnosed? and what does your thyroid do anyway? Most of us are familiar with this two-lobed, twenty to sixty gram,two-inch structure, located in the front of our necks and wrapped around our windpipe. It's a hormone producing gland with two products, thyroxine or T4 and its active hormone, triiodothyronnine or T3. I've always thought of its function as a major regulator of metabolism, but in reality that's only one of its duties: it does control how speedily we use energy, but also has a role in how we make proteins, how we react to other hormones and how our bodies handle calcium.

I've spent much of today reading about the thyroid; some things I knew; some I hadn't reviewed since med school basic science classes (1962-1964) and other were brand-new to me. Fetal development of the gland is stimulated by two other hormones released by the hypothalamus and pituitary and those are at high enough levels to cause the fetus to make T4 in clinically significant amounts by 18-20 weeks of gestation. The active hormone, T3, stays at low levels for another 10 gestational weeks, then increases until term.

The net result, it is felt, is protection of fetal development, especially of the brain, in the event the fetus's mother is herself in a hypothyroid state.

But back to adults and the link between thyroid status and mental health.  One of the crucial measurements of thyroid function is the level of TSH, thyroid stimulating hormone. Normal levels for this pituitary hormone are 0.4 to 5.0 in most labs in the United States; nearly nine years ago, the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists recommended the doctors consider treating patients whose TSH levels are higher than 3.0. Other scientific groups agreed.

If a TSH level above 5.0 is abnormal, then ~5% of our adult population is hypothyroid. But if that level is reduced to 2.5 to 3.0, then ~20% of us are hypothyroid.

I wonder if a new field of medicine, halfway between the endo folk and the mental health practitioners, is on the horizon.

http://www.umm.edu/endocrin/thygland.htm

Tags: , , ,
Posted in depression, medically-oriented background info, mental health issues, psychiatric drugs, scientific controversies, subclinical hypothyroidism | No Comments »

Issues with Psychiatric Drug use

November 26th, 2011

Are drugs always the answer?

An article in the Wall Street Journal for November 16th caught my eye. My wife is a mental health therapist (the non-prescribing variety) and I knew this one would interest her. The title was “Psychiatric Drug Use Spreads: Pharmacy Data Show a Big Rise in Antipsychotic and Adult ADHD Treatments.”

She wasn’t especially surprised to hear that one in five adults were taking at least one psychiatric drug.  But as opposed to anti-anxiety drug use, both of us were struck by the comment that drugs given (and perhaps overused) for kids with ADHD are also increasingly being given to adults.

I went to the Internet to find the data. There’s an enormous company called Medco that provides pharmacy services for greater than 65 million people. I had never heard of the firm, but it’s rated number 35 of the Fortune 500 and in 2009 reported revues just under $60 billion.

Their senior psychiatrist, a Dr. David Muzina, has a great CV, working in major roles at the Cleveland Clinic from 1999 to 2009. I did note his “Summary” claimed “17 year’s of Cleveland Clinic experience as a Staff Psychiatrist,” but he graduated from medical school in 1993, presumably finished his Psychiatry residency in 1997 and then ran an inpatient psych unit at Lutheran Hospital (location unspecified) for two years.

In any case Medco, where Dr. Muzina is a Vice President, in and presumably heading their Neuroscience Therapeutic Resource Center, published an extremely interesting report titled “America’s State of Mind.” (see link below). This summarizes research on the prescriptions of greater than two million people in this country from 2001 to 2010.

http://www.anxiolytiques.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Medco-2001-2011.pdf

The trends are stunning.

Boys and girls, men and women are all now more likely to be taking a drug used for mental health problems. Fifteen percent of adult men are on one or more of these medications and, amazingly, twenty-six percent of adult women.

In reality the ADHD drug use in adults is still comparatively uncommon (less than 2%), but NPR recently reported a severe shortage of Ritalin. Newer drugs which treat ADHD will enter the generic market in 2012; that should save patients considerable amounts of money.

The real impact is in the antidepressant arena: twenty-one percent of women 20 and over take these meds and the percent rises with age. It’s 16% of women ages 20 to 44, 23 percent of those between 45 and 64 and 24% of women over 65 years old. For men in comparable age groups the percent are 8, 11 and 13.

Then there’s regional distribution: what I call the “Middle West” and my own Mountain region have the lowest percentage on mental health drugs while Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi have the highest.

So how many are actually taking their meds as prescribed? And how many are having serious side effects?

An issue raised in one of the publications is that of patients not taking prescribed dosages of their meds (if any), having increased symptoms and physicians therefore increasing their medication dosage.

Then if they do start taking the drug as prescribed....

 

Tags: , ,
Posted in medically-oriented background info, mental health issues, psychiatric drugs, Publications, statistical analysis | No Comments »

Slim down those truckers

November 23rd, 2011

some truckers are relatively slender

I have two series of posts going, but couldn't resist the article I found in the New York Times while riding a recumbent bike in the gym. The title alone, "A Hard Turn: Better Health on the Highway," was enough to grab my attention.

The first story was typical, a trucker driving long hours every day, eating all the wrong foods, getting no exercise, gaining huge amounts of weight. I found the online abstract of a 2007 Journal of the American Dietetic Association article cited: long-haul truckers of necessity eat at truck stops and of 92 such truckers stopping at a Mid-eastern US truck stop nearly 86% were overweight and 56.5% were obese.

One of our family members used to be a truck driver and I've heard his stories of long days spent behind the wheel, eating greasy foods when he stopped. He's slimmer now and in better shape as his current employment allows him more exercise time and a choice of where and what to eat.

Now that insurance costs are rising sharply, the trucking firms are getting involved and the truckers themselves, there's over three million of them in the US, are coming to grips with the issue out of necessity. One group ran a blood-pressure screening clinic for 2,000 truckers at a truck show. Twenty-one were immediately sent to a nearby emergency room; one had a heart attack before reaching the hospital.

drive carefully around trucks like this

Trucks are involved in 400,000 accidents a year and 5,000 fatalities. I just watched a nearly eighteen minute video on how we, as drivers of passenger vehicles, contribute to those accidents; 70% are caused by the drivers of other vehicles (see link below). Yet many of the ones caused by trucker driver error occur because the trucker has a health problem or falls asleep.

http://www.sharetheroadsafely.org/cardrivers/Unsafe-Driving-Acts.asp

Some truckers are taking steps to decrease their weight and its accompanying risks for themselves and those who share the roads with them. A number of companies are helping (and perhaps finding a lucrative new client group). I just looked at a website for "Rolling Strong," and found a gym in my area that offers fitness programs for truckers. Others are joining Weight Watchers, a solid organization that my slender wife has belonged to for many years (she says she was "chunky" in high school) or creating their own programs for fitness: one carries a fold-up bike in his 18-wheeler and uses it whenever he stops for a break. Many are cooking in their trucks or even hiring a trainer.

Others joined the Healthy Truckers Association of America, paying $7.50 a month to belong to an organization that is rapidly growing (see link below to Chicago tribune article). That group now offers truckers a prescription drug card enabling its members to save ~60% on meds.

http://healthytruck.org/node/101

I applaud all these moves; if I'm on the road with a large truck or a series of them, I'd like their drivers to be in shape and wide awake.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Complications of Obesity, diabetes type 2, Dieting, Exercise possibilities, Food Choices, Governmental Efforts, Healthly lifestyle, Holiday/travel eating, Obesity, Publications, tricks and gimmicks, Weight Loss | No Comments »

Do our kids have a bleak future?

November 19th, 2011

As close to a salad as he'll get

I'm taking a break today from my series of posts on greenhouse gases, alternative energy source, volcanoes and global warming. All of those will affect the generations to come and those now growing up, but I want to re-examine another side of their issues. This morning I read two articles and one newspaper report on the heart health prospects for our American kids (and, by extension, kids elsewhere in the developed/rapidly developing world). The initial article came from a section of the Wall Street Journal I hadn't gotten around to reading yesterday and was about to recycle. Then I saw a title that caught my eye, "Kids' Hearth Health Is Faulted."

I found a CDC website with an explanation of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, NHANES. This is a continuation of a US Public Health Service effort started 40 years ago and is updated annually. Medically-trained interviewers may well come to your town and even to your front door someday. The data they obtain is used in many ways (I'll paste in a website that leads you to some comments on NHANES as well as to a link to a video).

Now a portion of the survey/study looked at 5,450 kids between 12 and 19, finding they were a long ways from matching the American Heart Association's (AHA) seven criteria for idea cardiovascular health (see 2nd link below to Harvard's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center's article on the subject). The adult health measures, known as Life's Simple 7, are: 1). Never smoked or quit more than a year ago; 2). Body Mass Index (a measure of height versus weight) <25; 3). Physical activity on a weekly basis for 75 minutes (vigorously) or 150 minutes (moderate intensity).; 4). a healthy diet (four or more components meeting AHA guidelines); 5). total cholesterol <200 mg/dL; 6). blood pressure (BP) <120/80; and fasting blood glucose (AKA blood sugar) <100 mg/dL. The original article was published in the journal Circulation January 20, 2010 and is available free online. The metrics are slightly different for kids.

So where do our kids stack up? If you exclude eating a healthy diet, only 16.4% of boys and 11.3% of girls meet the standards for the other six criteria; if you include diet, none of them do. They don't eat four to five servings of fruits and vegetables a day; they also don't get enough whole-grains or fish and they consume far to much salt and sugar-sweetened drinks. Only one fifth of them even eat "fairly well."

drop that hamburger and run for an hour

Many of then also don't exercise on a daily basis for at least sixty minutes (50% of the boys do and 40% of the girls). More than a third are overweight or obese.

There's some hope: a just-published article in the New England Journal of Medicine, examining the data from four studies following 6328 kids, found that those who do manage to lose weight had lower risk for type 2 diabetes, hypertension, abnormal lipids and carotid artery disease.

So I'm heading to the health club and will read the 2010 Circulation tome on an exercise bike.

Thus far my one biologic grandson, about to be 12,  is physically active and slender. I'll encourage him to stay that way and the non-biologic grandkids to follow his example.

More on this subject to come.

Check out these articles:

Survey Results and Products from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey

AHA Defines "Ideal" Cardiovascular Health

 

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Complications of Obesity, diabetes type 2, Exercise possibilities, Food Choices, Food-related disease, Life Expectancy, medically-oriented background info, our kids and their weight issues, physician initiatives, Publications, strategies for healthy aging, Unhealthy eating | 3 Comments »

Biofuels, greenhouse gases and you: Part one of many

November 17th, 2011

Not the right choice for a sustainable biofuel

The excursion into what was initially a vaguely known arena started with a Wall Street Journal article on 11-8-2011, but then strayed far afield as my learning curve tilted steeply upward.

The article itself dealt with airlines trying out newer biofuels: Alaska Airlines and United were highlighted as having pilot projects in this area. As I read further, scanning online material, international carriers, especially KLM, with 200 flights using 50% biofuels and, impressively, Lufthansa with 1,200 flights using 50% biofuels, are far ahead in this arena.

The fuels come not from corn, as in the United States, or sugarcane, as in Brazil (more on the latter in a subsequent post), but rather from algae, cooking oil, animal fat, and two plants I'd never heard of, Camelina (I'm trying to find it as a cooking oil) and Jatropha.

We had dinner company a few days ago; I was cooking a cabbage dish from the Shan people of Northern Thailand and Mynamar, Lynnette made squash and potatoes simmered in olive oils with both vegetables coming from our weekly CSA allotment. The dinner and subsequent conversations and disagreements (these are close friends and we have differing views on a wide variety of topics) lasted from just after 6 PM to just before 11.

It was immediately obvious that our friends favor oil, gas and coal as fuels. They don't think biofuels, solar energy, wind power, geothermal or tidal energy are economically feasible. They would approve of nuclear energy with appropriate precautions (avoiding building nuclear power plants on known earthquake faults or in areas prone to tidal waves comes to mind).

I think we haven't put enough time, money or brainpower into developing alternative energy sources and urgently need to do so. The political will to accomplish this seems lacking and our faltering, argumentative Congress, polarized as it currently is, hasn't helped the situation.

I certainly agree that subsidizing the growth of corn to be converted into ethanol isn't the way to go. And Brazil, despite its exceedingly osuccessful and sustainable biofuels program, isn't going to be able to supply enough ethanol to fuel the rest of the world.

Mount Saint Helen's in a quiet mood

Our friends said one volcano can add enough greenhouse gas (GHG) to make all our cars' polluting, to mix a metaphor, seem a drop in the bucket.

I don't disagree that the rare volcanic eruption can be catastrophic in this sense as in others (local loss of life and property among them). We've visited Mount Saint Helens (I strongly suggest reading Tim McNulty's 1998 retrospective on the explosion; just Google his name and add that of the mountain).

He makes the point that in this natural disaster, as opposed to industrial clear-cutting, damage was variable, trees, animals and insect survived and the area has come back strongly. I liked the line, "The ecosystem has been through this before."

Yet adding our dollop of pollution is not natural; it may tip us over an edge.

So I am in favor of the pursuit of alternative sources of energy. These may vary from country to country or within a country as the local winds, tides & solar-project possibilities permit.

But it's time and very nearly past time.

http://environment.about.com/od/fossilfuels/a/biofuels.htm

Tags: , , ,
Posted in biofuels, environmental issues, global warming, greenhouse gases, Publications, scientific controversies | No Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »