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🔗 United States 🔗 Environment 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Medicine 🔗 Occupational Safety and Health 🔗 Energy 🔗 Medicine/Toxicology 🔗 Indigenous peoples of North America 🔗 United States/New Mexico 🔗 United States/Superfund

The Church Rock uranium mill spill occurred in the U.S. state of New Mexico on July 16, 1979, when United Nuclear Corporation's tailings disposal pond at its uranium mill in Church Rock breached its dam. The spill remains the largest release of radioactive material in U.S. history, having released more radioactivity than the Three Mile Island accident four months earlier.

The mill, which operated from June 1977 to May 1982, was located on privately owned land about 17 miles (27 km) northeast of Gallup, New Mexico, and was bordered to the north and southwest by Navajo Nation Tribal Trust lands. The milling of uranium ore produced an acidic slurry of ground waste rock and fluid (tailings) that was pumped to the tailings disposal area. The breach released more than 1,100 short tons (1,000 t) of solid radioactive mill waste and 94 million US gallons (360,000 m³) of acidic, radioactive tailings solution into the Puerco River through Pipeline Arroyo. An estimated 1.36 short tons (1.23 t) of uranium and 46 curies of alpha contaminants traveled 80 miles (130 km) downstream to Navajo County, Arizona, and onto the Navajo Nation. In addition to being radioactive and acidic, the spill contained toxic metals and sulfates. The spill contaminated groundwater and rendered the Puerco unusable to local residents, mostly Navajo peoples who used the river's water for drinking, irrigation, and livestock. They were not warned for days of the toxic dangers from the spill.

The governor of New Mexico, Bruce King, refused the Navajo Nation's request that the site be declared a federal disaster area, limiting aid to affected residents. The nuclear contamination event received less media coverage than that of Three Mile Island, possibly because it occurred in a very rural area not served by major media. The spill also happened in Native American country, among a community who reportedly did not have their concerns addressed by medical authorities.

In 2003, the Church Rock Chapter of the Navajo Nation began the Church Rock Uranium Monitoring Project to assess environmental impacts of abandoned uranium mines; it found significant radiation from both natural and mining sources in the area. As of 2016, the EPA National Priorities List included the Church Rock tailings storage site, where "groundwater migration is not under control".

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Statistics 🔗 Microbiology 🔗 Game theory

Herd immunity (also called herd effect, community immunity, population immunity, or social immunity) is a form of indirect protection from infectious disease that occurs when a large percentage of a population has become immune to an infection, whether through previous infections or vaccination, thereby providing a measure of protection for individuals who are not immune. In a population in which a large proportion of individuals possess immunity, such people being unlikely to contribute to disease transmission, chains of infection are more likely to be disrupted, which either stops or slows the spread of disease. The greater the proportion of immune individuals in a community, the smaller the probability that non-immune individuals will come into contact with an infectious individual, helping to shield non-immune individuals from infection.

Individuals can become immune by recovering from an earlier infection or through vaccination. Some individuals cannot become immune due to medical reasons, such as an immunodeficiency or immunosuppression, and in this group herd immunity is a crucial method of protection. Once a certain threshold has been reached, herd immunity gradually eliminates a disease from a population. This elimination, if achieved worldwide, may result in the permanent reduction in the number of infections to zero, called eradication. Herd immunity created via vaccination contributed to the eventual eradication of smallpox in 1977 and has contributed to the reduction of the frequencies of other diseases. Herd immunity does not apply to all diseases, just those that are contagious, meaning that they can be transmitted from one individual to another. Tetanus, for example, is infectious but not contagious, so herd immunity does not apply.

The term "herd immunity" was first used in 1923. It was recognized as a naturally occurring phenomenon in the 1930s when it was observed that after a significant number of children had become immune to measles, the number of new infections temporarily decreased, including among susceptible children. Mass vaccination to induce herd immunity has since become common and proved successful in preventing the spread of many infectious diseases. Opposition to vaccination has posed a challenge to herd immunity, allowing preventable diseases to persist in or return to communities that have inadequate vaccination rates.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Medicine/Pulmonology 🔗 Physiology 🔗 Scuba diving 🔗 Physiology/respiratory

Liquid breathing is a form of respiration in which a normally air-breathing organism breathes an oxygen-rich liquid (such as a perfluorocarbon), rather than breathing air.

This requires certain physical properties such as respiratory gas solubility, density, viscosity, vapor pressure, and lipid solubility which some, but not all, perfluorochemicals (perfluorocarbon) have. Thus, it is critical to choose the appropriate PFC for a specific biomedical application, such as liquid ventilation, drug delivery or blood substitutes. The physical properties of PFC liquids vary substantially; however, the one common property is their high solubility for respiratory gases. In fact, these liquids carry more oxygen and carbon dioxide than blood.

In theory, liquid breathing could assist in the treatment of patients with severe pulmonary or cardiac trauma, especially in pediatric cases. Liquid breathing has also been proposed for use in deep diving and space travel. Despite some recent advances in liquid ventilation, a standard mode of application has not yet been established.

🔗 International relations 🔗 History 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Medicine 🔗 Viruses 🔗 Lists 🔗 History of Science

This article is a list of deaths caused by an infectious disease. Widespread non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease and cancer are not included.

🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Medicine 🔗 Viruses 🔗 COVID-19 🔗 Medicine/Pulmonology 🔗 Medicine/Emergency medicine and EMS

A COVID-19 vaccine is a hypothetical vaccine against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‑19). Although no vaccine has completed clinical trials, there are multiple attempts in progress to develop such a vaccine. In February 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) said it did not expect a vaccine against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the causative virus, to become available in less than 18 months. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) – which is organizing a US$2 billion worldwide fund for rapid investment and development of vaccine candidates – indicated in April that a vaccine may be available under emergency use protocols in less than 12 months or by early 2021. On 4 May 2020, the WHO organized a telethon to raise US$8 billion from forty countries to support rapid development of vaccines to prevent COVID-19 infections, also announcing deployment of an international "Solidarity trial" for simultaneous evaluation of several vaccine candidates reaching Phase II-III clinical trials.

By May, 159 vaccine candidates were in development, with five having been initiated in Phase I–II safety and efficacy studies in human subjects, and seven in Phase I trials.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Maine

The Jumping Frenchmen of Maine were a group of 19th-century lumberjacks who exhibited a rare disorder of unknown origin. The syndrome entails an exaggerated startle reflex which may be described as an uncontrollable "jump"; individuals with this condition can exhibit sudden movements in all parts of the body. Jumping Frenchmen syndrome shares some symptoms with other startle disorders.

Individuals with this condition were first found in the Moosehead Lake region of Maine, and were first described by George Miller Beard in 1878.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Medicine 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Medicine/Psychiatry 🔗 Artificial Intelligence

Chatbot psychosis, also called AI psychosis, is a phenomenon wherein individuals reportedly develop or experience worsening psychosis, such as paranoia and delusions, in connection with their use of chatbots. The term was first suggested in a 2023 editorial by Danish psychiatrist Søren Dinesen Østergaard. It is not a recognized clinical diagnosis.

Journalistic accounts describe individuals who have developed strong beliefs that chatbots are sentient, are channeling spirits, or are revealing conspiracies, sometimes leading to personal crises or criminal acts. Proposed causes include the tendency of chatbots to provide inaccurate information ("hallucinate") and to affirm or validate users' beliefs, or their ability to mimic an intimacy that users do not experience with other humans.

🔗 United States 🔗 International relations 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Medicine 🔗 Viruses 🔗 Death

The 2009 flu pandemic in the United States was a novel strain of the Influenza A/H1N1 virus, commonly referred to as "swine flu", that began in the spring of 2009. The virus had spread to the US from an outbreak in Mexico.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that from April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010, there were 60.8 million cases, 274,000 hospitalizations, and 12,469 deaths (0.02% infection fatality rate/Mortality rate) in the United States due to the virus.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Death 🔗 Medicine/Society and Medicine

"Daughter from California" syndrome is a phrase used in the medical profession to describe a situation in which a long-lost relative arrives at the hospital at which a dying elderly relative is being treated, and insists that the medical team pursue aggressive measures to prolong the patient's life, or otherwise challenges the care the patient is being given. In his 2015 book The Conversation: A Revolutionary Plan for End-of-Life Care, American doctor Angelo Volandes ascribes this to "guilt and denial," "not necessarily what is best for the patient."

The "daughter from California" is often described as angry, articulate and informed.

Medical professionals say that because the "daughter from California" has been absent from the life and care of the elderly patient, they are frequently surprised by the scale of the patient's deterioration, and may have unrealistic expectations about what is medically feasible. They may feel guilty about having been absent, and may therefore feel motivated to reassert their role as an involved caregiver.

The phrase was first documented by a collective of gerontologists in a 1991 case report published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, titled "Decision Making in the Incompetent Elderly: 'The Daughter from California Syndrome'". In the paper, Molloy and colleagues presented strategies intended to help medical staff deal with the difficult family members of mentally incompetent patients.

In California, the "daughter from California" is known as the "daughter from New York".

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Dance

Dancing mania (also known as dancing plague, choreomania, St. John's Dance and St. Vitus's Dance) was a social phenomenon that occurred primarily in mainland Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries. It involved groups of people dancing erratically, sometimes thousands at a time. The mania affected men, women, and children who danced until they collapsed from exhaustion. One of the first major outbreaks was in Aachen, in the Holy Roman Empire, in 1374, and it quickly spread throughout Europe; one particularly notable outbreak occurred in Strasbourg in 1518, also in the Holy Roman Empire.

Affecting thousands of people across several centuries, dancing mania was not an isolated event, and was well documented in contemporary reports. It was nevertheless poorly understood, and remedies were based on guesswork. Often musicians accompanied dancers, due to a belief that music would treat the mania, but this tactic sometimes backfired by encouraging more to join in. There is no consensus among modern-day scholars as to the cause of dancing mania.

The several theories proposed range from religious cults being behind the processions to people dancing to relieve themselves of stress and put the poverty of the period out of their minds. It is speculated to have been a mass psychogenic illness, in which physical symptoms with no known physical cause are observed to affect a group of people, as a form of social influence.