Legion of Angels News Archive

GONAIVES, Haiti - Cemetery workers trudge through the water with a wooden cart, fetching dozens of bloated corpses from the muck and carting them off for burial. The city’s 15 police officers have buried dozens more, and nobody knows how many were swept out to sea.

In this sodden city with no working morgue, nobody is counting the dead.

And after four tropical storms in less than a month, Haiti’s death toll will never be known.

“The water is bringing us the bodies,” cemetery director Jules Jean-Baptiste Jeudy said Tuesday. “If they have a family, then they get a coffin. If we just find them on the street, we just bury them.”

Working without electricity, face masks or gloves, Jeudy and his 10 employees roam the streets of this low-lying coastal city where Tropical Storm Hanna and Hurricane Ike sent rivers of mud up to the rooftops. Other Gonaives residents have taken it upon themselves to bury their relatives or neighbors.

Officials say at least 331 people have been killed in the storms in this desperately poor Caribbean nation. In the hard-hit region of Artibonite, which includes Gonaives, Hanna killed at least 172.

Those counting deaths are homeless
As the floodwaters recede and more bodies surface, Haiti’s government has all but given up trying to update the death toll. A committee that typically keeps track of such things in Gonaives disasters has disbanded, because its members were among the tens of thousands who lost their homes.

“Gonaives is an exceptional case,” said Abel Nazaire, a spokesman for the civil protection department. “The committee is nonexistent because they are homeless.”

The cemetery director’s nephew, Jonas, has been trying to keep track of the burials there in a red composition notebook. He had made 62 entries by Tuesday, 40 of them describing unnamed children.

“No. 38 — A girl from Parc Vincent,” one read. The word “blanket” followed, indicating the child was buried in a mass grave without a coffin.

“We made a big hole and put the bodies in,” said Jeudy, 68, whose brown shoes were wet from flood waters.

Police Commissioner Ernst Dorfeuille said his poorly equipped force — 15 officers and three cars for a population of 160,000 — has buried dozens of badly decomposed and unidentifiable corpses in graves outside the city.

Relief has been slow to arrive to Gonaives, where parts of the city were still under water Tuesday and about 70,000 people remained in shelters, according to World Food Program representative Myrta Kaulard.

U.S. Navy boat arrives with food
On Tuesday morning, an amphibious U.S. Navy boat reached Gonaives with 140 metric tons of food from the USS Kearsarge, which was diverted from Colombia on a humanitarian mission, according to Cmdr. Jim Spots.

The U.S. force was helping to solve logistical problems that delayed aid deliveries across Haiti. Two World Food Program trucks spent two days getting from the capital to the southern city of Les Cayes, only to become marooned on the way back by cracks in a bridge. A U.S. helicopter crew made the same journey in less than an hour Tuesday.

Families have little choice but to wait for help, and bury their dead.

Farmer Selondieu Rene, 47, was buried Tuesday, a week after he drowned trying to save his wife from floodwaters loosed by Tropical Storm Hanna. His family recovered his body on Monday, after the waters receded, and spent the last of their savings — 30,000 gourdes ($770) — on a brown lacquered coffin.

Bystanders winced at the smell as men carried his casket toward a white plaster tomb. There was no ceremony. A gray helicopter from the USS Kearsarge flew overhead.

“He put us on the roof and then he went back to get his wife,” said Iren, 22, one of Rene’s six children. “But he was not strong enough to swim and he disappeared.”

Source — MSNBC

BEIJING, China (CNN) – He cuts through the water like he’s shredding through the record books at the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.

U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps won his third gold medal and record-tying ninth of his career on Tuesday morning, breaking his own world record in the 200-meter freestyle.

The American won in a time of 1 minute, 42.96 seconds, lowering his old mark of 1:43.86 set at last year’s world championships in Australia.

It was expected he would face a strong challenge for the gold from the other finalists, but he led from the start, cruising to the wall nearly 2 seconds ahead of silver medallist Park Tae-hwan of South Korea, who finished in 1:44.85. American Peter Vanderkaay earned the bronze in 1:45.14.

Phelps already has nine career gold medals, tying him with four others, including swimmer Mark Spitz and track star Carl Lewis, for the most in Olympics history. He’s got five more chances for gold in Beijing — the next one comes Wednesday.

And he’s just 23.

“We’re not even realizing what an incredible athlete he is,” said Natalie Coughlin, a world-class Olympic swimmer in her own right. “Obviously he’s amazing and he breaks all these world records, but I think being a part of that, we almost take it for granted.”

In one sense, Phelps is much like the element he works in — calm, cool and clear. It’s only when he rips into the water that the waves start.

“I want to do things that no one else in the sport has ever done,” he has said.

Phelps has already done lots of things: 17 world championships and a couple dozen world records. His nine Olympic gold medals include three so far in Beijing — the last one he received Tuesday in the 200-meter freestyle.

“It will remain to be seen where history ultimately places him, but clearly today he is the best swimmer we’ve seen,” said Bob Bowman, Phelps’ coach.

Bowman began coaching Phelps when the swimmer was an 11-year-old who had difficulty focusing outside of the pool and a knack for getting into trouble.

“He was very active and never stopped moving and it was kind of hard to harness that at first,” Bowman said. “It’s a little bit counterintuitive because, even though he was so rambunctious as a young swimmer, when he raced, he was very focused.”

Swimming thousands of miles in a pool will do that to you.

“I think it was something that made me focus,” he said. “I always had dreams of being an Olympian, being a world-record holder, being a professional athlete, being a gold medallist, and I had to focus on those goals to achieve them and I knew that.”

The focus came from year after year of workouts in the pool.

He swam nearly four miles in each workout and often practiced twice a day with hardly a day off. Ironically, it is just that kind of intense work that may have cost Phelps much of his childhood.

“I think he missed out on a normal progression of things, but I wouldn’t say he’s missed anything,” Bowman said. “I would say he would tell you what he’s gained has been a lot better than what he’s missed.”

Phelps agrees.

“I would never trade going to the Olympic Games and standing on top of the medal podium or being able to turn professional or travel all over the world, I would never trade any of it in,” he said.

Phelps finds himself on the verge of diving into history. He has the opportunity to break the Olympics’ most hallowed record and eclipse Marc Spitz’s seven gold medals in the 1972 games.

Even if he gets gold in just half of the eight events he has entered, Phelps will hold the record for the most gold medals in Olympic history and could arguably be called the greatest Olympian ever.

“There are a lot of things that people haven’t done, and I want to change the sport and be the first person to do new things,” Phelps said.

With so much time spent with his head underwater, who can blame him if he likes to stick it in the clouds as well.

Source — CNN

AUTLAN, Mexico - Inspectors are collecting soil, water and produce samples, reviewing export logs and combing packing plants in three major tomato-growing states in Mexico.

But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration appears no closer to finding the source of a mysterious salmonella outbreak that has sickened more than 900 people nationwide.

The FDA is not even 100 percent sure that tomatoes are the cause — adding peppers and cilantro Saturday to its list of foods under investigation in the outbreak.

A team of three FDA inspectors has gone through five farms in the western states of Jalisco and Sinaloa in the past two weeks, looking at all aspects of tomato production: the greenhouses where they are grown, the packing plants where they are shut into boxes, the shipping methods for the trip north to the U.S.

They also plan to visit the northern state of Coahuila to finish up their study.

The results can’t come too soon for the three Mexican states that were targeted by the FDA, along with farms in Texas and Florida.

Bonanza 2001 farm in Autlan, Jalisco, which normally exports about 12,000 tons of tomatoes a year to the U.S., has hundreds of tons sitting in a warehouse near the Texas-Mexico border as demand has plummeted, said spokesman Luis Almejo.

They may rot.

Sinaloa growers also face big losses.

“We’re demanding that they release those results as soon as possible so that Sinaloa can be cleared of any suspicion,” said Manuel Tarriba, president of Sinaloa’s Tomato Growers Association, adding that he expects some results by the end of next week.

The outbreak, which began in April, has affected 943 people so far in 40 U.S. states, more of a third of them in Texas, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There have been 225 cases reported since June 1 — evidence that the source likely has not been contained.

The U.S. tomato industry has taken a $100 million hit as restaurants temporarily dropped tomatoes from their menus, and farmers have had to plow under their fields or leave crops to rot in packinghouses.

Mexico has not calculated its losses. But growers here worry they still may be under a shadow of suspicion as late as November, when greenhouses harvest their summer tomatoes.

FDA spokesman Kimberly Rawlings said Saturday evening that the FDA “is looking into tomatoes, cilantro, jalapeno peppers and Serrano peppers. We have started testing on those items within the past few days.”

Salmonella can be transmitted to humans when fecal material from animals or humans contaminates food. Fever, diarrhea and abdominal cramps typically start eight to 48 hours after infection and can last a week. Many people recover without treatment. But severe infection and death are possible. At least 130 people have been hospitalized in this outbreak, the CDC says.

FDA inspectors wouldn’t speak to an Associated Press reporter at the Bonanza 2001 farm, one of 15 in Jalisco state that export to the U.S.

As they reviewed the packing plant, workers in aprons, hairnets and plastic gloves cleaned and packed the last tomato harvest to be shipped to the company’s warehouse in Pharr, Texas.

Bonanza has about 150 acres of greenhouse tomatoes in a lush valley near Jalisco’s south coast, an area shared by several U.S.-owned tomato growing companies, including San Antonio-based Desert Glory, North America’s largest grower of greenhouse tomatoes.

Jalisco state agriculture official Martin Figueroa said FDA inspectors visited only Bonanza but left open the possibility of returning.

In Sinaloa, which grows about 40 percent of all tomatoes sent to the U.S., they checked full operations — including irrigation methods — at four farms, Tarriba said.

Sinaloa state wrapped up its winter harvest in June. Farmers now are cleaning their greenhouses and waiting for U.S. clearance before planting more tomatoes. They also are asking Mexican and U.S. authorities to come up with a binational certification program that would establish the same sanitation standards at every agricultural producer in Mexico, Tarriba said.

Currently, private U.S. certification companies check sanitation standards in Mexico.

He said once Sinaloa is cleared, the state will launch a damage-control ad campaign in the United States.

“We have to gain back the consumers’ trust,” Tarriba said.

Source — Yahoo!

YOU already know that if you exercise outside on hot and humid days, you should drink plenty of water. And you are probably well aware of the risk of heat stroke given the countless reports about the warning signs.

But if you’re going to be out exercising anyway, you may have different questions: How long does it take to acclimate to the heat and humidity, and what is the best way to do it? How much does your performance time slow when it is sweltering and humid, and why? Does it help to douse your head with water?

Should you go out in the morning, when it is cooler but the relative humidity is higher, or at night, when it tends to be hotter but less humid?

The answers, some exercise physiologists say, are not always what you might expect.

There is no question that heat can take a toll on performance. Look, for example, at results from races on the second weekend in June, when a heat wave gripped the Northeast.

On June 7, over 4,000 women ran the New York Mini 10-K race in Central Park. When the race began at 9 a.m., it was 71 degrees and the humidity was 78 percent. The winning time, 32 minutes 43 seconds, by Hilda Kibet, was the slowest in a decade.

“From the beginning, my legs were not really moving,” Ms. Kibet told The New York Times.

That same day in similar weather and humidity, in Cambridge, Md., nearly 1,400 athletes raced in the Eagle Man Half Ironman — a 1.2-mile swim, a 56-mile bike ride, and a 13.1-mile run. Among them was Amy Roth, 32, the director of corporate partnerships at the Whitney Museum in Manhattan. She had trained hard, but the run, in particular, was difficult in the intense heat.

“I felt like I was dragging along but I couldn’t move any faster,” Ms. Roth said.

Still, she ran at a mile pace of 8:07.

“There were very fast people, very good athletes, who were walking, who just couldn’t do it,” she said.

Afterward, some posted comments, agonizing over their sluggish times, on Slowtwitch.com. “You could see the neuroses: ‘Oh, my God, am I getting slower? What does this mean?’ ” Ms. Roth said.

The next day, 190 professional cyclists started the Philadelphia International Championship, a 156-mile race. It was 79 degrees at 9 a.m. start, and 94 degrees when the last cyclist finished in mid-afternoon. About half of the competitors dropped out. The winning time, 6:14:47, by Matti Breschel of Team CSC, based in the Netherlands, was nearly a half hour slower than last year’s time, when it was cooler and drier.

One reason performance declines on sultry, humid days is that working muscles have to compete with the skin for blood. Directing more blood to the skin removes body heat and helps keep your body’s temperature from rising to dangerous levels. But that can mean less blood reaches muscles. At the same time, when your body becomes hotter, muscle enzymes speed up, burning glycogen more rapidly, depleting stores of the sugar that the muscles use for fuel.

Until now, most studies of the effects of heat on performance used treadmills or stationary bikes. If the subjects simulated a 5-kilometer road race lasting 15 to 20 minutes, their times would be 10 percent slower at 100 degrees than at 70 degrees. The longer the subjects ran, the more the performance declined.

One concern is that studies with treadmills may not accurately reflect what happens outside on a scorching day. With no wind indoors, for example, sweat will not evaporate as effectively.

Scott Montain and Matthew R. Ely, researchers at the United States Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine in Natick, Mass., analyzed real-world data from seven major marathons, comparing performances over years when temperatures and humidity varied but the race course remained the same. Heat affected slower runners more, probably because they were on the course longer and ran in packs. Warm bodies close together make it harder for one’s body heat to dissipate.

An elite runner capable of finishing in less than two and a half hours on a cool day (41 to 50 degrees) would be 2.5 percent slower in warmer climes (68 to 77 degrees.) A three-hour marathoner on a cool day would be slowed by 12 percent in the heat, the researchers reported.

It may seem like a brilliant idea, then, to pour water over your head to cool down. That is what Floyd Landis did during a grueling ride on a hot day in the Alps during the 2006 Tour de France.

And last month, on that balmy Saturday, amateur runners used the same trick, dousing their heads, in an 8-kilometer race in Moorestown, N.J. Town residents also squirted runners with their garden hoses.

It is a useless ploy, said Samuel N. Cheuvront, another researcher at the Army institute. “Sweat must evaporate to provide cooling,” he said. “Dripping does not help.”

In fact, he added, if you get too wet you risk hidromeiosis, when sweat pores become blocked, which makes you even hotter.

AT least most races are held in the morning, when it is usually cooler and more humid, than later in the day, when it is hotter and drier.

Cold and humidity stresses the body less; you heat up less when it is cooler. Relative humidity may be greater on cool mornings, but what really matters for sweat evaporation is water vapor pressure. And water vapor pressure is lower when the air is cooler, meaning sweat evaporates faster.

Dr. Cheuvront said that if you have to choose between exercising in the morning when it is 60 degrees and 80 percent humidity, or in the evening when it is 90 degrees and 50 percent humidity, choose the morning.

Yet as challenging as heat and humidity are, people can acclimate. Blood volume expands, which reduces the strain on the heart from the increased demand for blood flow to the skin and muscles. And sweating increases — people who are heat adapted sweat sooner and more profusely, allowing their bodies to cool more efficiently.

For example, if you are not acclimated and run for an hour in 98-degree heat, your core temperature may go up to 103 degrees, bordering on the danger zone, said Craig Crandall, who studies heat acclimation at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. But if you are acclimated, your temperature might be 101 degrees after an hourlong run, which is well within the safety zone. Acclimation takes at least five days, Dr. Cheuvront found. He first asked participants to walk on a treadmill for 100 minutes in a room that was kept at 100 to 120 degrees.

On Day 1, Dr. Cheuvront said, they usually last 30 to 45 minutes. Then, he added, they will either request to get off the treadmill; collapse; or reach the safety-limit core temperature of 104 degrees, at which point they are stopped. By Day 5, just about everyone lasts 100 minutes.

It is possible to adapt even more. Dr. Cheuvront’s subjects continued to improve when they walked on the treadmill in that hot room for five more days.

Some people naturally adapt to heat much more than others. But Dr. Cheuvront said he had never come across a person who did not adapt at all.

The key to acclimation, he said, is to exercise in the heat daily and to be sure you are sweating profusely — wearing extra layers of clothing can help if you are exercising indoors or in cooler weather. Given a choice between spending more time in the heat but exercising less intensely, or less time and exercising more intensely, it is safer to choose to go longer and work less intensely, he said.

MS. ROTH’S impression that running was much harder than cycling in the heat was correct, physiologists say. And it is not just because there is more cooling wind when you ride. It is also because you don’t cycle upright, so your heart has less of a fight against gravity to pump blood to skin. That is especially true in the heat, when blood vessels in the legs are distended and blood tends to pool in the feet, making the flow of blood up to the head even more difficult.

But no matter how much you train in the heat, it will never be easy, athletes and researchers say. So perhaps the best strategy is to just accept discomfort and slowness.

“Heat is the X factor,” Ms. Roth said. “Sometimes you have to just forget it and move on.”

Source — The New York Times

Scientists who focus their time on the Red Planet cheerfully call themselves “Martians”. Well, it turns out these “Martians” know their turf well - and have hit some pay dirt in the Arctic region of the Fourth Rock from the Sun. Mars Odyssey spotted the telltale signs of water ice beneath the surface from orbit a few years ago. It was that finding that helped the Martians choose a landing site for Phoenix.

And from the moment they touched down, they saw the tantalizing signs that the ice was there - just a few inches beneath the rusty regolith. The dozen pulsed rocket thrusters cleared off a spot that was clearly white. Could it be ice? No way to dig right beneath Phoenix - but the once the arm and shovel got to work making some shallow trenches, it didn’t take long to find that white subsurface once again.

But was it the cool find Principal Investigator Peter Smith and his team at the University of Arizona had hoped for? Or was it something else?

But then something telling happened. Some dice-sized white crumbs disappeared from one of the trenches over the course of a few days. What could or would disappear like that?

You guessed it. Water ice. It doesn’t melt there (way to cold for that), but it does sublimate (go straight from solid to gas) in the wispy atmosphere of Mars.

So now the team just has to grab some of those “dice” before they sublimate - and toss them into the oven on Phoenix’ deck - and see what is inside. Could there be some organic material frozen inside? If so, that would be a big piece of evidence that there was (or maybe even is) life on Mars. I guess it all comes down to a roll of the “dice”.

- Miles O’Brien/CNN Space Correspondent

Source — CNN