>Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 04:22:51 -0700
>To: [log in to unmask]
>From: dogyears <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Got CALICHE ?
>
>Got CALICHE ?  http://www.swanet.org/caliche.html
>
>SEARCH RESUMES FOR AMELIA EARHART'S BONES 02/15/99 06:40PM SUVA, Fiji (AP)
>_ A hunt is about to begin in musty corners of Fiji's medical department
>buildings for the bones of missing American aviator Amelia Earhart. The
>government on Tuesday said it had authorized a search of storerooms in the
>Fiji Medical School and Suva's central hospital for remains of the pioneer
>aviator that might have been found in 1940 but were packed in boxes and
>forgotten. Earhart vanished in 1937 while attempting to become the first
>woman to fly around the world. Most authorities believe she and her
>navigator, Fred Noonan, lost their bearings, ran out of fuel and crashed
>into the Pacific while flying between Papua New Guinea and Hawaii. Some
>experts think the two were captured by the Japanese as spies and executed.
>The U.S. Navy conducted an elaborate search and picked up signals
>suggesting Earhart's plane went down somewhere in the region of the Gilbert
>Islands in the central Pacific. In 1940, a Fiji naval officer, Stanley
>Brown, was sent on a reconnaissance mission to uninhabited Nikumaroro, a
>desolate Gilbert atoll about 1,000 miles north of Suva, and reported
>accounts of finding the bones of two people of possible European origin.
>The bones were sent to British headquarters in Tarawa, where a physician
>concluded they belonged to a man. The bones were ordered crated for
>storage, but the crate vanished. Richard Gillespie, a former aircraft
>accident investigator from Wilmington, Del., recently found records of the
>examination in Tarawa and Britain, The Los Angeles Times reported in
>December. For almost a decade, Gillespie has been piecing together
>documents, debris and stories from tiny Nikumaroro _ formerly known as
>Gardner Island _ hoping for irrefutable evidence for his theory that the
>pioneering female aviator crashed there. He formed the non-profit
>International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery to search for evidence
>of Earhart's fate. Other experts who examined the records said the skeleton
>was that of a white female of northern European background, about 5 feet 7
>inches tall. The Fiji Museum said there are records of two wooden boxes
>arriving in about 1940 and possibly containing the bones of the missing
>fliers. The aircraft recovery group has made several expeditions to
>Nikumaroro in the past five years and recovered fragments of metal
>sheeting. Tests indicated the metal could have been from the aircraft flown
>by Earhart.
>
>KILLER FLU OF 1918 MAY HAVE BEEN AROUND FOR YEARS 02/15/99 12:26PM
>WASHINGTON (AP) _ The 1918 flu that killed more than 20 million people may
>have quietly percolated for several years, maybe even trading back and
>forth between pigs and people, until suddenly growing strong enough to
>become the world's worst pandemic. That's the latest theory from the Armed
>Forces Institute of Pathology, which reported Monday that researchers for
>the first time have completely analyzed a critical gene from the killer
>influenza virus. The gene likely "was adapting in humans or in swine for
>maybe several years before it broke out as a pandemic virus," said
>molecular biologist Ann Reid, lead author of the study published in the
>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. But "we can't tell whether
>it went from pigs into humans or from humans into pigs," she said.
>Different influenza strains circle the globe annually. Usually, they're
>fairly similar to viruses people have caught in the past. Every so often a
>strain tough enough to kill millions emerges, and experts warn that the
>world is overdue for another pandemic. That's why understanding the 1918
>flu's genes are important. Scientists need to know what made that strain
>the deadliest ever _ and why it struck down mostly young, healthy people _
>to better react if similar killer flu emerges again. Most experts believe
>that genetically stable flu viruses reside harmlessly in birds, but that
>occasionally one of these bird viruses infects pigs. The swine immune
>system attacks the virus, forcing it to change genetically to survive. If
>it then spreads to humans, the result can be devastating. In two other
>pandemics _ the 1957 Asian flu and 1968 Hong Kong flu _ viruses apparently
>made a fast jump from birds to pigs to humans. That's because human flu
>genes from those pandemics appear very similar to avian flu genes. But the
>new study finds no similarity between those bird genes and a key gene in
>the 1918 flu. Reid studied lung tissue preserved from autopsies of two
>soldiers who died from influenza, at Ft. Jackson, S.C., and Camp Upton,
>N.Y., and from the frozen corpse of an Alaskan woman. Reid fully mapped the
>hemagglutinin gene, which is key to influenza infection taking hold. She
>discovered that the hemagglutinin closely resembles mammal genes. So
>instead of making that fast bird-pigs-people jump that scientists expect in
>a pandemic, the 1918 virus apparently evolved in mammals _ either pigs or
>humans _ over many years before suddenly mutating into a mass killer. It
>may have percolated in humans as early as 1900, she said. But Reid can't
>tell if pigs developed the mutation that turned the virus into a killer and
>gave it to people _ or if people gave it to pigs. Among the evidence: A
>huge wave of mild influenza struck people during the spring of 1918, but no
>pigs were sick. Then the flu struck again in the fall. This time it
>suddenly killed millions of people, and this time pigs were sick, too _ but
>people who had had the mild spring flu were reported to be immune.
>Regardless of which species evolved the killer strain, the long incubation
>period has implications for predicting future flu outbreaks. "We may have
>to expand our concept of where pandemics come from," Reid said. Institute
>scientists are analyzing other genes from the 1918 virus, but Reid said the
>mystery so far is getting deeper. "The more you study it, the more
>perplexing it becomes."
>
>
>http://www.denverpost.com:80/news/news0216f.htm Kossler died before doctors
>could fly her to Albuquerque for treatment by hantavirus specialists. She
>is the fifth hantavirus victim in Colorado in the past year and one of more
>than 200 cases nationwide since the disease was identified following an
>outbreak on the Navajo reservation in 1993. Her ranch has numerous tack
>barns and outbuildings and rooms Kossler had converted to hold antique
>ranching collectibles.
>