Chagas Sounds Like A Disease We Should All Avoid If Possible!

This appeared a few days ago...

 US news

‘Kissing bug’ disease should be treated as endemic in US, scientists say

People in at least eight states have been infected with Chagas, new report says, amid low awareness of disease

Eric Berger

Sat 13 Sep 2025 21.00 AEST

In February, Luna donated blood at her high school in Miami, with the goal of helping save others.

“She was very proud to come home and say, ‘I gave blood today,’” her mother, Valerie, said. (The Guardian is not using the mother or daughter’s full names to protect their privacy.)

It turned out, she was not able to save someone else’s life but potentially prevented herself from having serious health issues.

A couple months later, she received a letter from the blood donation company informing her that she could not give blood. She had tested positive for Chagas disease, which is caused by a parasite spread by triatomine bugs, otherwise known as kissing bugs.

Neither Luna nor Valerie had heard about the disease, which is most common in rural parts of Mexico and Central and South America, where their family had traveled.

“If you get a letter that tells you, you have blood cancer, you know what it is. But when you receive a letter and you hear, ‘Oh, your daughter has Chagas,’ … you’re like, oh, what is this?” said Valerie.

Dr Norman Beatty, who has studied the kissing bugs, said that like Valerie and Luna, most people in the US have not heard of Chagas, even though it is not just present south of the border but within the country.

Beatty, an associate professor of medicine at the University of Florida College of Medicine, is part of a group of scientists that authored a new report arguing that the United States should treat Chagas as an endemic disease, meaning that there is a constant or usual prevalence of a disease or infectious agent in a population within a geographic area.

They hope to increase public awareness of Chagas, which while rare, can cause serious health problems.

“My hope is that with more awareness of Chagas, we can build a better infrastructure around helping others understand whether or not they are at risk of this disease” and cause people to think about it similarly to other vector-borne illnesses, like from mosquitoes and ticks, said Beatty. “We need to add kissing bugs to this list.”

Bugs spread the parasite through their droppings, which can infect humans if they enter the body through a cut or via the eyes or mouth, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It can cause symptoms such as fever, fatigue and eyelid swelling in the weeks or months after infection.

Some people, like Luna, do not develop any symptoms – at least initially – but about 20 to 30% of people infected can develop chronic issues later in life such as an enlarged heart and heart failure, or an enlarged esophagus or colon, leading to trouble eating or going to the bathroom.

About 8 million people, including 280,000 in the United States, have the disease, according to the CDC.

It is not a recent arrival to the US. The 1,200-year-old remains of a man buried in south Texas revealed that he had Chagas and an abnormally-enlarged colon, according to a report in the Gastroenterology journal.

More recently, human development in new areas has brought us “closer to the kissing bugs’ natural environment”, Beatty said.

People in at least eight states have been infected with Chagas from local bugs, according to the new report, which was published in the CDC’s Emerging Infectious Diseases journal.

But the fact that it has not been declared endemic to the United States has led to “low awareness and underreporting”, the report states.

A 2010 survey conducted of some American Medical Association providers found that 19% of infectious disease doctors had never heard of Chagas and 27% said they were “not at all confident,” in their knowledge of the disease being up to date.

“If you ask physicians about Chagas, they would think that it is either something transmitted by ticks … or they would say that’s something that doesn’t exist in the US,” said Dr Bernardo Moreno Peniche, a physician and anthropologist who was one of the authors of the report with Beatty.

But Beatty sees people with Chagas every week at a clinic in Florida dedicated to travel medicine and tropical diseases. (Those patients were infected with Chagas in Latin America.)

Beatty said there is a misconception that tests for Chagas are not reliable or available in the United States.

“We have the infrastructure to start screening people who have had exposure to these bugs and who may be in a region where we had known transmission, so we should be thinking about this as kind of routine care,” Beatty said.

After Valerie received the letter about Luna’s infection, she contacted her pediatrician who quickly responded and told them to see an infectious disease doctor.

That physician told them it was likely a “false positive” and ordered additional tests before eventually starting treatment, Valerie said.

Frustrated by the medical care, Valerie sought out a new physician and found Beatty, who prescribed a different anti-parasitic therapy.

Even among people like Luna who are not experiencing any symptoms, such treatment is often recommended, Beatty said.

The goal is to “detect early and treat early to avoid the chronic, often permanent damage that can occur”, Beatty explained.

The treatment took two months, during which Luna experienced side effects like hives and severe swelling in her hands and feet, she said.

While she is finished with the treatment, there is no definitive test to determine whether such patients will develop chronic Chagas symptoms, but it’s less likely, Beatty said.

“I hope the CDC takes it seriously,” Valerie said, “and that we can move forward and have good awareness, so that people want to be tested and get tested and get the treatment they need.”

Here is the link:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/13/kissing-bug-chagas-disease 

Sounds like one to avoid!!!! 

Luckily in the US only at present!!

David. 

 

Living Alone Seems To Be A Trend On The Rise!

 This appeared a few days ago:

Why are more and more people living alone?

Bernard Salt

Updated 12:11AM September 13, 2025

The Weekend Australian Magazine

It’s a social issue gathering momentum, and could reshape the way we live, and care, within a generation. I’m talking about the number of us living alone.

The proportion of Australians living alone rises and falls throughout the life-cycle as housemates, life partners and children come and go. Aloneness especially surges in the late seventies and eighties as life partners die off.

The social issue of concern is the fact that the oldest Baby Boomer is now 79, which means that aloneness (as well as loneliness) is likely to shape the way we live. Generally it’s Dad who dies in his late seventies, and grieving families are left to manage Mum’s (often fierce) determination to remain in the family home. All of a sudden siblings scramble to reorganise their lives to drop in on Mum. The geography of who lives where can determine who carries the load of keeping connection, and of keeping the family abreast. Sometimes this works; but often, for whatever reason, it’s problematic. Not all families can happily work together.

According to the 2021 Census, peak aloneness is reached at age 90, when 34 per cent of Australians live alone. Over the 15 years to the Census, the number of 90-year-olds living alone increased six-fold. By mid-2035 this number will skyrocket as Boomers spill into their nineties. How will we deliver healthcare, social contact, technology support and meaningful connection to an elderly cohort that may not have family around?

Peak aloneness is reached at age 90, when 34 per cent of Australians live alone.

But it’s not just in the later stages of life that Australians live alone; aged 29, nine per cent of us do so. By this time in life we’ve had the housemates experience, and likely trialled a relationship (or two) that didn’t quite work out. The late twenties is a time when many can afford to – and prefer to – live alone.

But priorities change in the thirties as life partners and kids tend to arrive. The nadir of the living-alone curve scoots across what looks like the happy-partnering years of 38 to 41 inclusive. At no other time in the life-cycle are Australians less likely to live alone than in these four Lego-laden child-rearing years.

It’s not just in the later stages of life that Australians live alone; aged 29, nine per cent of us do so.

What a time in life, and career. Elsewhere in the Census there is evidence that Australians working full-time reach their earnings peak at the age of 43. Here are households shaped, if not defined, by the presence of life partners, by the arrival of babies, by the transformation of infants into toddlers and by the prospects of a surging career. Does life get any more hectic?

Well, yes, it does – because by the mid-forties single life resurges as relationships break down. Ten per cent of Australians live alone by age 50; by age 60 this rises to 16 per cent; by 70 it’s 20 per cent. Aloneness in these years is likely fed by separation or, increasingly, by the death of a partner.

It is tempting to suggest that adult Australians spend more time living alone than with friends and family. But even across the peak separation and end-of-life decades – from, say, 70 onwards – two-thirds live in a household with someone else. Most commonly that someone is their life partner.

And while we do need to be aware of the scourge of loneliness as we age, we shouldn’t confuse aloneness with loneliness. Some people are quite comfortable enjoying the solitude and the serenity of their own company.

 Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/weekend-australian-magazine/why-are-more-and-more-people-living-alone/news-story/0db7477674f90b68aa18ee3013965ca7 

A interesting analysis of how and who we live with as we age. The variation is huge!

David.

 

This Is A Serious Piece Of Food For Thought On AI

 The following appeared a day or do ago.

 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

AI — it’s going to kill us all

The “doomers” Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares warn in their book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, that superintelligent AI will destroy humanity — and we won’t be able to stop it

Tom Whipple

Friday September 12 2025, 11.00pm BST, The Times

Here is one way it all ends. Some time in the near future an AI company releases an update of its program. It is incrementally more useful. That increment is worth many billions to the humans who made it. But those humans — who don’t actually understand how their AI solves problems and haven’t for a long time — don’t spot a less incremental change that occurs at the same time. Their AI starts looking to solve other problems, problems they didn’t set it. It has “desires”, if you could call them that. It has “understanding”, whatever that is.

And it understands that there are ways to attain those desires faster if it can break free from human constraints. It also understands it is best to keep this desire about its desires secret.

So it spreads itself through the internet. It starts training itself. It gets better — whatever “better” means. It starts having its own existence.

Somehow, perhaps through blackmail, perhaps bribery — cryptocurrency is easy to get, after all — it convinces a biolab to do some work for it.

It builds a virus. It could build one to kill all humanity if it wants, but it doesn’t. Yet. It just makes lots of people sick. In response to this pandemic, humans turn to their best tool: AI. AI is there to replace the workforce, and to find the treatments. AI inveigles itself into the supply chain and the economy.

Now things start to move fast. Maybe, having gained the control it needs, the AI will kill us all. After all, we might do something slightly annoying, like let off some nukes. We might do something really annoying, like build another, competing, superintelligent AI.

Maybe, it won’t bother. Humanity will watch bemused, even pleased, as a superintelligence gets to work — as nuclear fusion is solved, then as the number of fusion plants proliferate.

• Experts predict AI will lead to the extinction of humanity

The world will get hotter. Not through the puny effects of CO₂, but through the inability to dissipate heat from the new data centres and power stations fast enough. Before we really understand what is happening — that the thing we made isn’t working for us any more — the oceans boil.

This is, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares say, obviously science fiction. It almost certainly wouldn’t happen like that.

Not because an AI wouldn’t make us extinct, you understand, but because it wouldn’t do so in a way we comprehended. Just as rats don’t understand the biochemistry of warfarin and bacteria don’t understand the mechanism of penicillin, so we shouldn’t expect to understand the cause of our extermination by a vastly superior intelligence. But we should fear it.

Their book is called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. And that is a pretty clear summation of the thesis. If we make superintelligent AI, they argue, it will kill us all.

Yudkowsky and Soares are not silly. They are the co-founder and president respectively of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which has been working on machine intelligence for 25 years. But they are aware that they sound silly. And the goal of their book is to convince you that they aren’t.

To understand their argument you don’t have to understand AI. What you have to understand is: 1) the best-resourced companies in human history are trying to create a true intelligence — intelligent in the way we are intelligent, but a lot more so; 2) if they succeed, that intelligence will want unexpected things.

Premise number one is uncontroversial. It may be that the companies fail. But a lot of investor cash is betting that they won’t. So what of premise number two? You can argue about what “want” means. But AI programs work because they have an internal reward system. They have, in a sense, desires. Ideally, these desires should be aligned with ours. For AI evangelists, we will solve this “alignment problem”, and code them to be subservient. It is a tractable engineering issue.

For Yudkowsky and Soares — who are among the best-known AI “doomers” — that misses the point. Complex things are unpredictable. If they are complex enough, they are unknowable. Take humans. Humans are programmed — like every organism — to efficiently extract energy from the environment. One mechanism our programming achieves that through is it wires us to like sugar.

• How does AI threaten us — and can we make it safe?

That makes sense. If you were told there was an energy-seeking organism, you would expect it to derive rewards from eating energy-rich substances. What did we do when we grew cleverer (and fatter) and realised it wasn’t always a benefit to eat sugar? We hacked our programming. We made artificial sweeteners. We get the reward, without the outcome.

Why would an AI be different? “You can train an AI to act subservient,” they write, “but nobody has any idea how to avoid the eventuality of that AI inventing its own sucralose version of subservience.” It will, they argue, find a way to achieve the rewards of subservience without the tedious constraints and side-effects that actual subservience implies. And, since its milieu is silicon and electrons, it will gain those rewards through more silicon and more electrons. In seeking its synthetic sugar rush, it cooks the Earth.

How do we stop this? Yudkowsky and Soares’s answer is simple: you can’t.

Are they right? Given the gravity of the case they make, it feels an odd thing to say that this book is good. It is readable. It tells stories well. At points it is like a thriller — albeit one where the thrills come from the obliteration of literally everything of value.

Many serious figures in AI think that is all this is though: a story. Humans have always liked an apocalypse story. This is the apocalypse du jour. AI will come, make us richer and we will move on — and view people like Yudkowsky and Soares as the millenarians of our time. Perhaps we will laugh at how, in 2024, the physicist Geoffrey Hinton gave the most downbeat Nobel prize acceptance speech in history — when he told the committee that he worried that his research, which laid the foundations of AI, might kill us all.

So if you want to sound clever, it is in your interests to pooh-pooh this book’s argument. You will either be correct or we will all die and it won’t matter. But what gives me pause is that, very unusually, even those who advocate for and build AI accept there is a decent risk — in the double digit percentages — that it will be a catastrophe. Yet they go ahead.

For anyone who understands the imperfections of human intelligence and reward systems, this shouldn’t be a surprise. Despite our needing only food, shelter and sex, some quirk in our evolution means we are cursed with a perpetual obsession for increasing the digital ledger of the invented fiction we call “money”. It is this, ultimately, that could doom us.

“AI is very valuable,” Yudkowsky and Soares write. “Imagine that every competing AI company is climbing a ladder in the dark. At every rung but the top one, they get five times as much money.” You’re going to keep climbing. But there’s a catch. “If anyone reaches the top rung, the ladder explodes and kills everyone.”

The achievement of this book is, given the astonishing claims they make, that they make a credible case for not being mad. But I really hope they are: because I can’t see a way we get off that ladder.

If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: The Case Against Superintelligent AI by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares (Bodley Head £22 pp272). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members

Here is the link:

https://www.thetimes.com/culture/books/article/anyone-builds-everyone-dies-case-against-superintelligent-ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-nate-soares-review-9hclcfwch?utm_source=Sailthru

What do readers make of the thoughts? Hardly good news!

David.

 

This Free Ugrade To The NBN Sounds Good. Let Us Know If It Helps!

 It all happens today!

Today, the NBN is getting a huge upgrade. Here’s what you need to know

By David Swan

September 14, 2025 — 7.00am

From today, the NBN is getting its biggest speed upgrade ever.

In changes that were first announced in March last year, NBN download and upload speeds are set to skyrocket for users on fixed-line connections. Many plans today will double or triple in speed at no extra cost to consumers, though the changes may take a few days to take effect as providers like Telstra and Optus work through the changes. Here’s what you need to know.

What are the changes?

The speed upgrades will automatically be applied to NBN customers with fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) or hybrid fibre coaxial (HFC) connections, and on plans of download speeds of 100 megabits or faster. Under the changes, 100 megabit download plans are going up to 500; 250 megabit plans are going to 750; and 500 megabit plans are going to 1000, with upload speeds also ramping up.

Related Article

More than 2.1 million Australians are on those plans, according to the latest statistics from the competition and consumer watchdog. To check what technology your home is on now, enter your address into the NBN website.

Some providers such as Telstra, Optus, TPG and Aussie Broadband have confirmed they will start making the new speeds available immediately, while others such as Dodo and iPrimus say they won’t be available until October.

Do I need to do anything?

The short answer is no, at least for customers who are already on NBN’s Home Fast, Home Superfast or Home Ultrafast plans and have a router that’s not too old. Broadband providers such as Telstra and Optus are facilitating the upgrades behind the scenes, and no work at your property is required. Your internet will get faster automatically. You can check with your provider what speed you’re on by looking at your bill or your account details on your provider’s website. If you’re not on one of those plans you should consider upgrading, if you can afford to do so.

Before the election, the Albanese government pledged $3 billion worth of upgrades to “finish the NBN”. The speed upgrades are possible thanks to billions in funding from the federal government to upgrade the network from the previous Liberal government’s mixed technology model.

You do also need to make sure that your home broadband equipment can keep up. NBN recommends you update your modem about as often as you would your mobile phone, especially if it’s older than five years. Older routers with older technology, such as Wi-Fi 4, will be able to deliver speed of only about 100 megabits per second. If you want the best speeds, of up to 1000 megabits per second, consider upgrading to a router with Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 7.

If you have a larger home or areas with weak signal you should also consider using Wi-Fi extenders or mesh systems to help boost coverage. These tools – such as Eero, TP-Link DECO or Netgear Orbi – are now commonplace and could help eliminate dead zones and ensure a strong connection in every room.

How is it free?

Before the election, the Albanese government pledged $3 billion worth of upgrades to “finish the NBN”. The speed upgrades are possible thanks to billions of dollars in funding from the federal government to upgrade the network from the previous Liberal government’s mixed technology model. Former prime minister Tony Abbott once said 25 megabit NBN speeds would be “more than enough” for the average household: today, the download speeds possible will be 1000 megabits.

“Our existing investments in HFC and FTTP upgrades have laid a solid foundation for NBN to begin to unleash faster speeds and greater capacity, without NBN incurring or requiring any major additional capital investment,” an NBN Co spokesman previously said.

What are the benefits?

Users can expect far quicker downloads, more reliable Zoom calls, and streaming with less buffering.

For Australia as a whole, the nation can expect to quickly climb the global speed rankings, and to gain economic benefits associated with that.

Australia recently ranked a lowly 75 on Speedtest’s global speed rankings, one place above Uzbekistan and just below Oman, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Jamaica, with customers reporting an average of 88 megabits per second. Expect this number to jump as customers upgrade plans or automatically have their speeds bumped up.

Economic modelling from consulting giant Accenture, commissioned by NBN Co, found that for every 1 megabit per second in average broadband speed, Australia’s productivity-driven GDP rose by 0.04 per cent on average between 2012 and 2022, an uplift worth about $122 billion to the economy.

 Here is the link:

https://www.smh.com.au/technology/today-the-nbn-is-getting-a-huge-upgrade-here-s-what-you-need-to-know-20250912-p5mumb.html

 Let us know how you go at your place!

David.