Protecting people from deadly floods, quakes in the Philippines

Typhoons thrash the Philippines every year, causing flash flooding and mudslides that often kill hundreds of people in the Southeast Asian nation. Many blame the death and destruction on the wrath of nature. But Gavin Shatkin has a different view.

“Disasters are not natural,” says Shatkin, associate professor of urban planning. “They happen because of social structures.”

The problem with the Philippines — especially its sprawling capital, Manila — is that too many people live in areas vulnerable to deadly flooding because they can’t afford to dwell in safer places, Shatkin says.

Another problem is a lack of information. “They’re limited with what they can do because they don’t have basic data that says where the people are who are most threatened by floods,” he says.

Shatkin and a group of eight graduate students in the Urban and Regional Planning Program plan to address these problems when they travel to the country this week.

They will spend a week in low-income communities along the Marikina River, which runs through the greater metropolitan Manila area, home to more than 11 million people. The students will research ways to restructure communities so that disasters won’t hit them so hard and the neighborhoods can snap back faster.

The group also plans to create sophisticated maps with overlays that provide information about topography, flood zones, demographics and geological features.

Flooding isn’t the only concern. The group also will be evaluating earthquake preparedness. Seismologists are warning that a massive quake may soon hit the Manila area. They estimate the quake could damage 40 percent of the residential buildings and kill 52,000 people.

When the research is finished, the group will present a plan for its client, the Center for Disaster Preparedness, a non-governmental organization involved in disaster preparedness.

— William Foreman, News Service

Kids in low-income families drink more juice than recommended

To help keep at bay health risks such as childhood obesity and early tooth decay, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) recommends limiting fruit juice in children age 1-6 to one serving per day.

A new report from the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health shows that many kids in low-income families are getting more than the recommended amount of juice.

The poll asked parents of young children of all economic levels about their children’s juice consumption. Overall, 35 percent of parents report that their children 1-5 years old have two or more cups of juice on a typical day — twice the amount recommended by the AAP.

“It is important to limit juice consumption in young children because there is such a strong link between consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and child health problems like obesity and early tooth decay,” says Sarah Clark, associate director of the Child Health Evaluation and Research (CHEAR) Unit and associate director of the National Poll on Children’s Health. “For many obese children, sugary beverages make up a large proportion of their daily energy intake.”

Of parents whose household income is less than $30,000 annually, 49 percent report that their children drink two or more cups of juice per day. Only 23 percent of parents with household incomes of $100,000 or more report that their children drink two or more cups of juice per day.

These findings are concerning, Clark says.

“Both childhood obesity and early dental problems are more prevalent in lower-income children, so the children we’re most worried about in terms of these conditions are also those who are drinking the most juice,” Clark says.

The AAP recommendation for 100 percent fruit juice still is limited to no more than one serving per day.

— Margarita Wagerson, UMHS Public Relations

How social media helps save an endangered language

There was a time when everyone living in Michigan grew up speaking the native language of the area’s indigenous people. Now less than 10 people born in the state are fluent, yet more than 2,700 people “like” the language on Facebook.

Howard Kimewon, who teaches in the Ojibwe Language program, part of LSA’s Program in American Culture, was born in Ontario and grew up speaking the language there. His colleague Margaret Noori learned the language later in life in Minnesota, where she grew up. And now she is combining her background in linguistics and marketing with a facility for social media and technology to leverage interest in the language she has come to love.

“I want to use every available platform to its utmost,” says Noori, director of the Comprehensive Studies Program and a lecturer in the Ojibwe language and literature. Noori made a presentation on crossing the digital divide to help save endangered and minority languages on Feb.17 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Vancouver, Canada.

In her talk, she examined ways that tools of modern life from Facebook and Twitter to YouTube are helping to keep the native language of the Ojibwe people — called Ashininaabemowin — alive.

“We started our website — www.ojibwe.net — in 2006,” Noori says. The goals: to produce proficiency in the next generation, and to archive the contributions of fluent elders.

“We save all the posts of fluent elders, and archive them at the Bentley, adding to the storehouse of information about this endangered language.”

The website now contains more than 450 audio files, in addition to lessons, songs, and stories. The site also contains a series of spoken lessons and examples of the language, aimed at people who are auditory and visual learners.

— Diane Swanbrow, News Service

Extreme poverty: 2.8 million children in the U.S. live on $2 per day

One in five households with children in poverty are surviving on the cash equivalent of a half-gallon of milk per person per day in a given month.

The National Poverty Center has released a new report that examines poverty trends between 1996 and 2011. The number of households with children who are in extreme poverty in a given month — living at $2 or less in income per person per day — in 2011 totaled roughly 1.46 million households, including 2.8 million kids. This number is up from 636,000 households in 1996, nearly a 130 percent increase.

The study finds that in-kind public programs are having an effect, though. The number of children living in extreme poverty is cut in half to 1.4 million in 2011 when the statistics take into account benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as the Food Stamp Program).

“We think it is important to document this significant growth in extreme poverty in the U.S. since the mid-1990s, as well as the buffering effects of our key public in-kind assistance programs,” says H. Luke Shaefer, an assistant professor in the School of Social Work and the study’s lead author.

In 1996, welfare reform ended the only cash entitlement program in the United States for poor families with children. This was replaced with a program that offers time-limited cash assistance and requires able-bodied recipients to participate in work activities.

This reform has been followed by a dramatic decline in cash assistance caseloads, from an average of 12.3 million recipients per month in 1996 to 4.4 million in June 2011; only 1.1 million of these beneficiaries are adults.

— Jared Wadley, News Service

Egyptians want democracy, but not U.S. efforts to promote it

The Egyptian trial of employees of four American groups that were promoting democracy abruptly was postponed earlier last week. But the crisis in U.S.-Egyptian relations continues, for reasons, according to a U-M researcher, that have a lot to do both with domestic Egyptian politics and with American Middle East policy.

“Many Americans believed that Egyptians would welcome American democracy promotion efforts since there has been broad public support in Egypt for both democracy in general and the ouster of the anti-democratic regime of Hosni Mubarak in particular,” says U-M political scientist Mark Tessler, who co-directs the Arab Barometer Study, which surveys public attitudes in 11 Arab nations.

“But in fact, the survey we conducted in Egypt just this summer showed that a solid majority of the Egyptian public distrusts American foreign policy and this includes American democracy promotion activities in their country.”

The Arab Barometer Study is coordinated by an international team composed primarily of Arab scholars, and involves face-to-face interviews with representative, probability-based national samples. In the most recent Egyptian survey, researchers interviewed 1,220 men and women.

Among the questions: Did respondents think “the influence of the United States on the development of democracy in their country” was positive or negative. Twenty-seven percent said they thought it was very negative while only 8 percent considered it very positive. Additionally, 25 percent thought U.S. influence on the development of democracy was somewhat negative, 28 percent said somewhat positive, and the rest said neither positive nor negative.

“While the overall distribution of judgments about American democracy promotion is somewhat mixed, it is clearly skewed in a negative direction,” says Tessler, who is the Samuel J. Eldersveld Collegiate Professor of Political Science and vice provost for international affairs.

Egyptian respondents also were asked about their views about the kind of political system they would prefer to see emerge in Egypt. Given a choice between a “civil system” and a “religious system,” 73 percent chose a civil system and 27 percent chose a religious system.

— Diane Swanbrow, News Service

Pregnant primates miscarry when new male enters group

Pregnant female geladas show an unusually high rate of miscarriage the day after the dominant male in their group is replaced by a new male, a new U-M study indicates.

The “Bruce effect” — in which pregnant females spontaneously miscarry after being exposed to an unfamiliar male — has been found repeatedly in laboratory rodents. However, no conclusive evidence for this effect had ever been demonstrated in a wild population prior to this study. Geladas are Old World monkeys that are close relatives of baboons.

The findings appear in the new issue of Science Express.

The U-M research examined five years of data collected from a wild population living in the Simien Mountains National Park in Ethiopia.

“The million-dollar question, of course, is how do these females miscarry? Are their bodies responding to a social cue? A chemical one? A combination of the two?” says Jacinta Beehner, an assistant professor in the departments of Psychology and Anthropology, and the lead author on the study.

Geladas live in family groups with one dominant male and up to a dozen related females. The dominant male gets to mate with his females as long as he remains dominant. However, there are many “bachelor” males that are just waiting for their chance to oust him. If a bachelor is successful, he gains reproductive access to all of the group’s females and often kills any dependent offspring sired by his predecessor. Predecessor males are allowed to stay on in the group as subordinates.

By killing infants, the new male hastens the return to fertility for these otherwise lactating females. Older juveniles that already are weaned are safe, since their mothers can mate with the new male.

“But the unweaned infants don’t stand a chance against an adult male — even with their mother’s protection,” Beehner says.

The other researchers include Amy Lu, a post-doctoral researcher in psychology; and Thore Bergman, an assistant professor in the departments of Psychology and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology.

— Jared Wadley, News Service

LSI lab identifies potential antibiotic alternative to treat infection without resistance

Researchers at U-M have found a potential alternative to conventional antibiotics that could fight infection with a reduced risk of antibiotic resistance.

By using high-throughput screening of a library of small molecules from the Center for Chemical Genomics at the Life Sciences Institute, the team identified a class of compounds that significantly reduced the spread and severity of group A Streptococcus (GAS) bacteria in mice. Their work suggests that the compounds might have therapeutic value in the treatment of strep and similar infections in humans.

“The widespread occurrence of antibiotic resistance among human pathogens is a major public health problem,” says David Ginsburg, a faculty member at LSI, a professor of internal medicine, human genetics and pediatrics at the Medical School, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

Ginsburg led a team that included Scott Larsen, research professor of medicinal chemistry and co-director of the Vahlteich Medicinal Chemistry Core at the College of Pharmacy, and Hongmin Sun, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Missouri School of Medicine. Their research results were published online Feb. 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Work on this project is continuing at U-M and the University of Missouri, including the preparation of new compounds with improved potency and the filing of patents, Larsen said.

Current antibiotics interfere with critical biological processes in the pathogen to kill it or stop its growth. But at the same time, stronger strains of the harmful bacteria can sometimes resist the treatment and flourish.

An alternate approach is to suppress the virulence of the infection but still allow the bacteria to grow, which means there is no strong selection for strains that are resistant to antibiotics.

— Laura Williams, Life Sciences Institute

Record-breaking wind from stellar mass black hole discovered

The fastest wind ever discovered blowing off a disk around a stellar-mass black hole has been observed by a team of astronomers that includes a U-M doctoral student.

Using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, an orbiting telescope, they clocked the record-breaking super wind at about 20 million mph, or about 3 percent of the speed of light. This is nearly 10 times faster than astronomers had previously observed from a stellar-mass black hole.

“This is like the cosmic equivalent of winds from a category five hurricane,” says Ashley King, a doctoral student in the Department of Astronomy and lead author of the study published in the Feb. 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “We weren’t expecting to see such powerful winds from a black hole like this.”

The result has important implications for understanding how this type of black hole behaves. Stellar-mass black holes are born when extremely massive stars collapse. They typically weigh between five and 10 times the mass of the sun.

The stellar-mass black hole powering this super wind is known as IGR J17091. Located in the bulge of the Milky Way galaxy, about 28,000 light years away from Earth, it is a binary system in which a sun-like star orbits the black hole.

The wind speed in IGR J17091 matches some of the fastest winds generated by supermassive black holes, objects millions or billions of times more massive.

“It’s a surprise this small black hole is able to muster the wind speeds we typically only see in the giant black holes,” says co-author Jon Miller, an associate professor in the Department of Astronomy.

Another unanticipated finding is that the wind, which comes from a disk of gas surrounding the black hole, may be carrying away more material than the black hole is capturing.

Astronomers believe that magnetic fields in the disks of black holes are responsible for producing the winds.

— Nicole Casal Moore, News Service

Fewer women need repeat breast cancer surgeries with new service at U-M

Nearly one in three women who have breast cancer surgery will need to return to the operating room for additional surgery after the tumor is evaluated by a pathologist.

A new service at the Comprehensive Cancer Center drastically cuts that number by having pathologists on-site in the operating suite to assess tumors and lymph nodes immediately after they are removed. Meanwhile, the surgeon and patient remain in the operating room until the results are back, and any additional operating can be done immediately.

This cut the number of second surgeries needed by 64 percent, to one of every 10 women.

U-M began offering the service about two years ago at its East Ann Arbor Ambulatory Surgery Center, where the majority of outpatient breast cancer surgeries now occur. A study evaluating 271 patients treated eight months before and 278 treated eight months after this program began appears in the American Journal of Surgery.

“The frequent need for second surgeries among patients undergoing breast cancer surgery represents a tremendous burden for patients. Beyond the inconvenience and additional time away from work, additional surgeries can result in worse cosmetic outcomes and increased complication rates. Our experience shows that offering on-site pathology consultation has a substantial impact on quality of care,” says lead study author Dr. Michael S. Sabel, associate professor of surgery at the Medical School.

The study authors also considered new guidelines that suggest fewer women need to have their lymph nodes removed if the sentinel lymph node biopsy is positive. The authors factored in that reduction and still found that intraoperative analysis was highly cost-effective.

Additional U-M authors include Dr. Julie M. Jorns, Dr. Angela Wu, Dr. Jeffrey Myers, Dr. Lisa A. Newman and Dr. Tara Breslin.

— Nicole Fawcett, Comprehensive Cancer Center

Public interest in pandemic flu vaccine faded over time

When a new strain of influenza began to sicken even healthy younger adults three years ago, public interest in getting the newly developed H1N1 vaccine started strong but declined over time even as more people were getting sick, a new study shows.

Researchers at RAND Corp. and U-M found that the more the public learned about this new type of influenza and the longer they had to wait for the vaccine, the less interested they were in getting it.

“Our results provide further evidence of how important it is to develop technology to speed vaccine production,” says the study’s co-author, Brian Zikmund-Fisher, an assistant professor in the School of Public Health. “Many more people would have been interested in vaccination had the vaccine been available even three months earlier.”

The study, a collaboration between Zikmund-Fisher and Courtney Gidengil and Andrew Parker of the RAND Corp, was released Feb. 16 for advance online viewing by the American Journal of Public Health.

Each year the strains of influenza circling the world change slightly. Occasionally a new strain emerges, as happened in March 2009 with the H1N1 virus. Later that spring the World Health Organization declared a level 6 pandemic, the highest level possible, which meant that the disease had spread worldwide. In the United States, the peak rate of infections and hospitalizations from H1N1 occurred between September and December 2009.

The U-M and RAND study found that intention to get vaccinated dropped from 50 percent in May 2009 when news of H1N1 first surfaced but the vaccine was not available to just 16 percent of unvaccinated people by January, when the last survey was given.

The authors’ findings are consistent with the fact that by December 2009, only 24 percent of the entire U.S. population received the H1N1 vaccine. Fortunately the 2009 H1N1 strain was not particularly deadly.

— Wendy Wendland-Bowyer, School of Public Health

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