Among this week’s Least Popular Americans, along with Rev. Fred Phelps, Rex Grossman’s dad and FAA tech support, we might count the United States Preventive Services Task Force. That group released new guidelines on screening mammograms, recommending that women start regular mammograms at 50 rather than 40, and get them every two years instead of annually.

The change has been met with a jet of venom from advocates, many medical professionals and much of the general public. Chicago has an interesting place in this controversy – we’ve been hearing the national dust-up all week, and now here’s a look at what this means for our part of the world. Read the rest of this entry →

When we reporters go out and get stories, we use electricity. This electricity comes from batteries. These batteries die, and get tossed into boxes back here at the WBEZ mothership. These boxes pile up … um, for years. In sum: we now have a modest-sized superfund site in the middle of our newsroom.

I have watched the batteries pile up with morbid fascination. I have idly wondered: How much toxic waste is in there? How many birth defects could we cause? How many fish could we mutate, if we felt like it? And what the heck do we do with all of them?

The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency is sponsoring a household hazardous waste collection event this weekend in the northwest suburbs, where they accept disposable batteries, among other things. So I thought this was as good a time as any to investigate.

The first task was to get a handle on the volume. This was accomplished with a bathroom scale, and documented by our crack multimedia team.

I confess, the results surprised even me. We have accumulated 184.4 lbs of used batteries. Now these aren’t sealed in a drum in a storage area some where. These are on the shelves near the CD labels – plus a hefty stockpile in Ammad Omar’s cubicle (read: haz-mat disposal site). OK, now to find out how much mercury and sundry heavy metals are in one pound of AA batteries, multiply that by 184.4 pounds, and get one big scary number.

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In Greek mythology, the mighty Lapiths had their butts handed to them by the centaurs. My question is this: what were you thinking, Lapiths? I mean, they’re centaurs. They have horse bodies and man-heads. No way you’re gonna beat that.

Similarly, sort of, we’re now confronting a hybrid little beastie of our own. The 2009 H1N1 flu virus is a crazy chimera of a thing. It is the love child of three species-specific viruses, a bird-pig-person germ. We might ask, how does this happen? And what makes it different from the regular flu?

Well, I’m here to tell you something you may not know about viruses: they are promiscuous as hell. And here’s something you may not know about pigs: they are little biological swingers clubs.

Flu viruses don’t have DNA like many organisms – their genetic material is carried in strands of RNA. And, that RNA is divided up into little discrete segments. When viruses get to all bumpin’ and rubbin’ up on each other in a host cell, they freely swap these segments around. Filthy little buggers. The results of this, according to University of Chicago infectious disease expert Kenneth Alexander, is usually … nothing. Most of the products of such unholy coupling are just failed viruses. But occasionally, you’ll get a combination that works, and a new kind of virus survives and starts copying itself.

That’s where pigs come in. They have the peculiar property of being subject not just to swine flu, but also bird flu and human flu. So all those viruses can mix freely in the pig’s cells, and we can wind up with a hybrid H1N1 with genes from all three variants. In this case, that variant happens to be transferrable from person to person.

Unlike seasonal flu, we are now passing around a novel strain. That means none of us has been exposed before, so we don’t have any acquired immunity. True, the seasonal flu tends to mutate from year to year too, but the strains are usually similar enough that we keep at least some of our past immunity. This also means that otherwise healthy adults may be at risk from pandemic flu, whereas with seasonal flu the concern tends to focus on the elderly and the very young. Seasonal flu can still do a number on you: an average of 36,000 Americans die of it every year, according to the CDC. The fear is that if pandemic swine flu were to really get out of control, and possibly grow more virulent, the mortality rate could get ugly. No sign of that for now, but if we learn one thing from the Lapiths, it’s not to underestimate your enemy.