#Contamination Reduction

[technogenenterprise]

How Technogen Enterprise's Induction Sealing Machines Can Boost Your Packaging Efficiency

In today’s fast-paced and highly competitive market, packaging efficiency is more crucial than ever. Companies constantly strive to streamline their packaging processes, reduce waste, and ensure product integrity. One way to achieve these goals is by using advanced packaging technologies. Technogen Enterprise’s induction sealing machines are at the forefront of such innovations, offering…

[minimac-mspl]

Reconditioning of EH oil

A power plant in western India using chinese technology turbine EHC system saved 3.01 Cr approx. with MLC LVDH TRIX-20 EH oil filtration

Synopsis

A power plant (2 x 600 MW) in western region of India was struggling with the rapid increase in TAN values in the EH oil of the governing system of the turbine and moisture content was also more than permissible limits. Degradation of the oil was due to contamination ingression into the system and resulting into formation of by-products.

Minimac’s EH oil reconditioning system “MLC LVDH TRIX 20 “act as saviour for the plant which has escaped the unexpected shutdown of the turbine worth 2.8 Cr (approx. 48 hours downtime) and cost & effort for replacement of oil worth 21 lakhs.

Problems

Failure of servo valve, hunting and sluggish behavior of the turbine, unplanned shutdown, presence of varnish & silt in the clearance of the spool, high TAN value leading to electro kinetic erosion of line and accessories of EHC system, ingression of particle & moisture contamination…… Ultimately all resulting to GENERATION LOSS & REVENUE LOSS

Solutions

Installation of Minimac’s EH oil reconditioning system “MLC LVDH TRIX 20” comprehensively designed with 4 major technologies to:

Remove solid contamination from oil by Superfine filtration

Remove moisture from oil by vacuum Dehydration technology

Remove Total Acid Number (TAN) by Ion exchange technique.

EHC system tank moisture removal and ingress prevention by Inert Gas blanketing technique.

Along with equipment installation, our service engineer has trained the customer’s team on the function of the EH oil Re-Conditioner, FRF maintenance and contamination control, Importance of Oil Analysis Program.

Benefits

Extending oil life.

Reduced TAN value.

Eliminate oil Replacement cost.

Protect Turbine against hunting.

Increased Turbine availability & reliability.

Cost Saving

This plant managed to save:

Cost of oil replacement: ₹21 Lakh approx.

Cost of downtime: ₹2.8 Cr approx

CO2 e Saving

Above graph shows the trend analysis of NAS 1638, moisture and TAN value around one-month installation of the reconditioning of EH oil at customer site.

Consumable required to finish this reconditioning of EH oil having quantity of 1200 liters are: 01 quantity of 10 micron and 03-micron filter element. Total consumption of resin was 36 liters

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[happypandajunkremoval]

Garbage Collection Company: Streamlined Services for Everyone

In our modern world, where convenience and efficiency are essential, reliable garbage collection has become increasingly important. As urban areas expand and populations grow, the challenge of waste management intensifies. Garbage collection companies play a crucial role in maintaining cleanliness, public health, and environmental sustainability. In this blog, we’ll explore how these companies streamline their services to cater to households, businesses, and communities alike.

The Role of Garbage Collection Companies

Garbage collection companies are vital in ensuring the safe and efficient removal of waste from various sources, including residential, commercial, and industrial sectors. Their services go beyond mere trash pickup; they are key players in waste management strategies that promote environmental health.

Why Waste Management Matters

Effective waste management is not just about collecting trash; it involves a series of activities aimed at minimizing environmental impact. Key aspects include:

Collection and Transportation: Efficient systems to gather and transport waste to disposal or recycling facilities.

Disposal: Safe methods for disposing of waste, such as landfilling or incineration.

Recycling and Composting: Converting materials into reusable resources to reduce landfill usage.

Public Education: Raising awareness about waste reduction and responsible disposal.

Proper waste management is essential for maintaining community health and environmental integrity. It helps reduce pollution, conserve resources, and foster sustainable practices.

Streamlined Services Provided by Garbage Collection Companies

Garbage collection companies are continuously evolving to meet customer needs, employing innovative strategies and technologies. Here are some of the key services that enhance efficiency and customer satisfaction:

1. Customized Collection Schedules

Recognizing that each household and business has unique waste disposal needs, many companies now offer customizable collection schedules. Clients can choose collection days that best suit their needs, whether weekly, bi-weekly, or on-demand. This flexibility helps prevent overflow and ensures effective waste management.

2. Multiple Waste Streams

Modern garbage collection companies encourage waste segregation by offering separate collection services for:

General Waste: Non-recyclable items.

Recyclables: Paper, plastics, glass, and metals.

Organic Waste: Food scraps and yard waste for composting.

By promoting waste separation at the source, these companies facilitate recycling and composting, significantly reducing landfill waste.

3. Advanced Technology Integration

Technology plays a crucial role in optimizing garbage collection. Innovations like GPS tracking and route optimization enhance operational efficiency:

GPS Tracking: Allows companies to monitor their fleet in real-time, ensuring timely pickups and minimizing fuel consumption.

Route Optimization: Algorithms determine the most efficient collection routes, reducing travel time and operational costs.

4. Bulk Waste Collection Services

Many companies provide bulk waste collection for larger items that regular trash services cannot handle. This includes furniture, appliances, and yard waste. Scheduled bulk pickups make it easier for residents to dispose of large items responsibly.

5. Recycling Programs and Incentives

To promote recycling, many companies have implemented programs that incentivize customers, such as:

Discounts for Recycling: Reduced rates for clients who consistently recycle.

Educational Workshops: Community events that teach proper recycling practices.

Recycling Contests: Friendly competitions that encourage neighborhoods to increase their recycling efforts.

These initiatives not only divert waste from landfills but also foster a culture of sustainability.

6. E-Waste Collection Services

With the rapid advancement of technology, electronic waste (e-waste) poses significant environmental challenges. Many garbage collection companies now offer specialized services for e-waste collection and disposal, ensuring safe handling of harmful materials. Services can include:

Drop-off Events: Opportunities for residents to bring in e-waste for safe disposal.

Partnerships with Certified Recyclers: Collaborations that ensure e-waste is processed responsibly.

7. Community Engagement and Support

Garbage collection companies actively engage with their local communities to raise awareness about waste management. This includes sponsoring clean-up days, participating in environmental fairs, and providing educational resources on waste reduction. Community involvement fosters a sense of responsibility and encourages sustainable behaviors.

Environmental Impact of Garbage Collection Services

The work of garbage collection companies extends beyond maintaining cleanliness; it significantly impacts environmental health. Here are some key benefits:

1. Reduced Landfill Waste

By promoting recycling and composting, garbage collection companies help divert waste from landfills. This not only conserves space but also minimizes greenhouse gas emissions from decomposing organic matter.

2. Conservation of Resources

Recycling programs allow valuable materials to be recovered and reused, reducing the need for new resources. This conservation effort leads to lower energy consumption and decreased pollution.

3. Pollution Prevention

Efficient waste collection practices help prevent illegal dumping and littering, protecting land and waterways from contamination. Reliable services contribute to cleaner, healthier environments.

4. Support for Sustainable Practices

Through community education and engagement, garbage collection companies promote sustainable practices, encouraging individuals and businesses to adopt greener habits, such as reducing single-use plastics and composting.

Challenges Faced by Garbage Collection Companies

Despite their vital role, garbage collection companies encounter several challenges in delivering streamlined services:

1. Increasing Waste Generation

As populations grow and consumption patterns change, the amount of waste generated continues to rise. Companies must adapt to increasing demand while maintaining efficiency.

2. Contamination of Recyclables

Contamination—when non-recyclable items are placed in recycling bins—remains a significant challenge. This can lead to entire loads being sent to landfills, undermining recycling efforts. Educating the public on proper recycling practices is essential.

3. Regulatory Compliance

Navigating complex regulations and environmental laws can be daunting. Garbage collection companies must stay compliant while providing quality services, particularly smaller firms that may lack resources.

4. Infrastructure Limitations

In some areas, outdated infrastructure hinders efficient waste collection and processing. Upgrading facilities and equipment requires significant investment, posing challenges for many companies.

The Future of Garbage Collection Services

As we look ahead, the garbage collection industry is set for transformation. Several trends and innovations are shaping the future of waste management:

1. Enhanced Automation

Automation is expected to play a larger role in waste collection. Automated trucks, robotic sorting systems, and AI-driven analytics can streamline operations and improve efficiency.

2. Greater Emphasis on Sustainability

With increasing awareness of environmental issues, garbage collection companies are likely to prioritize sustainable practices further. This may involve expanding recycling programs and exploring waste-to-energy technologies.

3. Smart City Initiatives

As cities evolve, garbage collection services will be integrated into broader urban planning efforts. Real-time data collection and improved coordination with other municipal services are likely to enhance efficiency.

4. Community-Centric Approaches

Future services will continue to focus on community engagement and education. By fostering partnerships with residents, businesses, and local organizations, companies can create tailored solutions that address specific community needs.

Conclusion

Garbage collection companies are essential to maintaining public health, environmental sustainability, and community cleanliness. Through streamlined services, advanced technology, and community involvement, these companies are evolving to meet diverse client needs.

As challenges in waste management grow, the importance of effective garbage collection becomes increasingly clear. By supporting these companies and adopting responsible waste practices, we can all contribute to a cleaner, healthier, and more sustainable future. Whether you’re a homeowner, business owner, or community leader, understanding the value of garbage collection services is crucial in our collective effort to manage waste responsibly and protect our planet.

[dynamichealthinsights]

The Impact of Pollution on Lifespan and Health

Pollution is an ever-looming threat to both the environment and human health. Over the past decades, research has consistently linked various forms of pollution to adverse health outcomes, reduced life expectancy, and deteriorated quality of life. Pollution is not just an environmental issue but a critical public health crisis that demands urgent attention. Whether it’s the air we breathe, the…

[ysatticinsulationinc]

Air Duct Cleaning: A Must for Healthy Indoor Air Quality

Air duct cleaning is pivotal in maintaining a healthy indoor environment, ensuring the air circulating through your home is clean and free from contaminants. Over time, dust, allergens, and other pollutants accumulate in ductwork, impacting air quality and potentially exacerbating health issues such as allergies and respiratory conditions. Regular cleaning of air ducts not only enhances the efficiency of your HVAC system but also significantly reduces energy costs by removing obstructions that hinder airflow. Furthermore, it eliminates odors, contributing to a fresher and more inviting home atmosphere. Investing in professional air duct cleaning services is a proactive step towards safeguarding your family's health, optimizing system performance, and ensuring a cleaner, healthier living space. Embrace the benefits of clean air ducts for a more comfortable and energy-efficient home.

YS Attic Insulation Inc 2130 N Arrowhead Ave Unit 205 D San Bernardino, CA 92405, United States (909)488-0763

[mywinepal]

Do You Have a Nose for Wine Faults? Take the Quiz.

Do You Have a Nose for #WineFaults? Take the #Quiz. #somm #winelover #corktaint

Good or Bad wine experience Understanding and identifying faults in wine is crucial for both novice and seasoned enthusiasts. Wine faults can significantly diminish the overall enjoyment of a bottle, affecting its aroma, taste, and texture. Common faults include cork taint, oxidation, and microbial contamination, each imparting undesirable characteristics to the wine. Recognizing these faults,…

[pravalika]

Water Treatment Systems Market - Forecast (2023 - 2028)

View More @ https://tinyurl.com/bdhrmkkk

Water Treatment Systems Market size in 2019 is estimated to be $5.85 billion and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 7.56% during the forecast period 2020-2025. Water is an essential constituent in the food and beverage industry. It is being used for cleaning raw materials and for the formulation of food and beverage products. Water scarcity and rising demand for water are increasing the demand for cost-effective water treatment technologies. Increased efforts from regulatory bodies to conserve and recycle water is also contributing to the growth of this market. In the food and beverage industry, water treatment systems are used to help achieve sustainable and clean drinking water as well as to manage wastewater. 

Key Takeaways

Increasing demand for water treatment in the food and beverage industry to remove bacteria, brine and other contaminants, is a major factor driving the water treatment systems market.

The high cost of water treatment equipment is a major factor limiting the growth of the market during the forecast period 2020-2025.

By region, Asia Pacific accounts for a major share of the Water Treatment Systems Market, in 2019.

By Treatment Process - Segment Analysis

By the treatment process, the reverse osmosis systems segment is the fastest growing and is projected to grow at a CAGR of 7% during the forecast period 2020-2025. This is owing to the increasing use of reverse osmosis in the food industry to remove bacteria and brine in meat, or for alcohol removal from spirits. Reverse osmosis allows water to pass through a semi-permeable membrane, which acts as a filter and prevents harmful chemicals, organic materials, sediments, and other impurities to pass through. The resulting water is fresh and free from any contaminants. This treatment process also offers additional advantages such as removal of color, odor, chemicals or taste, and ensuring that there are no residual products. It is also fast, efficient and environmentally friendly, making this method’s usage very popular in various applications.

The treatment processes vary with the quantity of water to be purified and the end-use. For instance, countertop water filters are commonly used in residential water treatment equipment whereas inline filters are more efficient for industrial processes. On the other hand, UV water purifiers and charcoal water filters can be used in small-scale as well as large-scale applications.

By Application- Segment Analysis 

By application, the Beverage Industry is estimated to account for a major share of the Water Treatment Systems market during 2019. This is owing to the rising usage of water to manufacture mineral water, fruit juices, sodas, soft drinks, energy drinks, alcoholic beverages, and others. Every beverage requires a specific water treatment procedure. The beverage industry requires a large amount of water to manufacture their products. Furthermore, stringent manufacturing regulations to ensure hygienic beverages and increased efficiency of production processes are increasing the demand for these systems. Growing consumption of energy drinks with the rising health concern is set to contribute to the growth of the Water Treatment System Market during the forecast period 2020-2025.

Geography- Segment Analysis

In 2019, APAC accounts for 36% of the Water Treatment Systems Market share by region. The increasing population along with the growing demand for fresh drinking water is a major factor propelling its market growth. Also, growing health concerns and strict government regulations to purify water from cleaning raw materials to implementing recipes is a major factor driving the market in that region. Besides, ease of availability of raw materials has encouraged global companies to expand to APAC and establish their production facilities in this region, further fueling the growth of this market.

Drivers –Water Treatment Systems Market 

Increased focus on preventing food or beverage contamination

Contamination is a key concern in the food and beverage industry. Government and regulatory authorities are establishing strict rules to reduce contamination in the food and beverage production process. Hence the use of water treatment systems are increasing. Industries such as dairy processing have major concerns over contamination since milk is prone to contamination by bacteria and other microorganisms. Techniques such as reverse osmosis, UV disinfection, and others are commonly used in the food and beverage industry. The use of water treatment systems in the food and beverage industry aids in disinfection and sterilization of water by removing dangerous organisms and contaminants in it. Increasing demand for water treatment is owing to the purity, safety, and quality of this water post its treatment and the wider application of this water.

Enhanced Taste and Clarity of Beverages 

Filtering enhances the taste of beverages as well as its appearance. Moreover, water treatment in beverages plays a prominent role in ensuring hygiene and efficient production while improving the taste of the product. This makes water treatment systems popular for use in the beverage industry. Also, increasing health concern has driven the demand for low-salt or low sugar beverages, which is fueling the use of water treatment systems in eliminating the excess minerals and salts in beverages. The rise in health consciousness is set to increase the consumption of energy drinks in the coming years thereby contributing to the growth of this market as production of such drinks also increases.

Challenges– Water Treatment Systems Market 

The cost of an efficient water treatment system is very high, including the cost of its technology and installation, which is hindering the market growth. Industrial water treatment systems also require timely maintenance and have other associated expenses, which for the end-users is a cost burden. Thus, the high cost of water treatment equipment is a major factor restraining market growth during the forecast period 2020-2025.

Water Treatment Systems Industry Outlook

Product launches, mergers and acquisitions, and joint ventures are key strategies adopted by players in this market. Water Treatment Systems top 10 companies are Global Water Solution Ltd, Unilever PLC, EcoWater Systems, A.O. Smith, Koninklijke Philips N.V., 3M, Watts Water Technologies Inc., Aquasana Inc., Pelican Water Systems, and General Electric Company.

Developments:

In March 2019, Arvind Ltd. launched water components and O & M services business Kaigo where the components and spare verticals include the products and technologies used in the creation and maintenance of efficient wastewater treatment.

In April 2019, Pentair plc entered an agreement to acquire U.S. water treatment equipment companies Aquion and Pelican Water Systems.

In September 2019 Aquatella launched a 4-Stage countertop water filter that eliminates 99% of all harmful pathogens, heavy metals, pesticides and chemicals from drinking water.

[reasonsforhope]

"An environmental toxicologist in California is cleaning up areas contaminated with heavy metals or other pollutants using fungi and native plants in a win-win for nature.

Where once toxic soils in industrial lots sat bare or weed-ridden, there are now flowering meadows of plants and mushrooms, frequented by birds and pollinators: and it’s thanks to Danielle Stevenson.

Founder of DIY Fungi, the 37-year-old ecologist from UC Riverside recently spoke with Yale Press about her ongoing work restoring ‘brownfields,’ a term that describes a contaminated environment, abandoned by industrial, extraction, or transportation operations.

A brownfield could be an old railway yard or the grounds of an abandoned oil refinery, but the uniting factor is the presence of a toxic containment, whether that’s a petrochemical, heavy metal, or something else.

Noting that she had read studies about mushrooms growing around the Chernobyl nuclear plant, she came to understand further, through her work, that fungi are an extraordinarily resilient species of life that consume carbon, and even though petroleum products are toxic to plants, to mushrooms they are essentially a kind of carbon.

In fact, mushrooms break down several categories of toxic waste with the same enzymes they use to consume a dead tree. They can also eat plastic and other things made out of oil, like agrochemicals.

At the Los Angeles railyard, as part of a pilot project, Stevenson and colleagues planted a variety of native grass and flower species alongside dead wood that would incubate specific fungi species called arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, which assists plants in extracting heavy metals like lead and arsenic from the soil.

Alongside traditional decomposer fungi, the mixture of life forms demonstrated tremendous results in this brownfield.

“In three months we saw a more than 50 percent reduction in all pollutants. By 12 months, they were pretty much not detectable,” Stevenson told Yale 360.

Decontaminating soil like this typically involves bringing in a bulldozer and digging it all up for transportation to a landfill. This method is not only hugely expensive, but also dangerous, as contaminated material can scatter on the winds and fall out of the backs of trucks carting it away.

By contrast, the plants that draw out the toxic metals can be harvested and incinerated down to a small pile of ash before cheap transportation to a hazardous waste facility.

The technique, which Stevenson says has some scaling issues and issues with approval from regulators, is known officially as bioremediation, and she’s even used it to safely break down bags of lubricant-soaked rags from bicycle repair shops.

“People who live in a place impacted by pollution need to have a say in how their neighborhood is being cleaned up. We need to empower them with the tools to do this,” she said."

-via Good News Network, July 16, 2024

[headspace-hotel]

I went down the internet rabbit hole trying to figure out wtf vegan cheese is made of and I found articles like this one speaking praises of new food tech startups creating vegan alternatives to cheese that Actually work like cheese in cooking so I was like huh that's neat and I looked up more stuff about 'precision fermentation' and. This is not good.

Basically these new biotech companies are pressuring governments to let them build a ton of new factories and pushing for governments to pay for them or to provide tax breaks and subsidies, and the factories are gonna cost hundreds of millions of dollars and require energy sources. Like, these things will have to be expensive and HUGE

I feel like I've just uncovered the tip of the "lab grown meat" iceberg. There are a bajillion of these companies (the one mentioned in the first article a $750 MILLION tech startup) that are trying to create "animal-free" animal products using biotech and want to build large factories to do it on a large scale

I'm trying to use google to find out about the energy requirements of such facilities and everything is really vague and hand-wavey about it like this article that's like "weeeeeell electricity can be produced using renewables" but it does take a lot of electricity, sugars, and human labor. Most of the claims about its sustainability appear to assume that we switch over to renewable electricity sources and/or use processes that don't fully exist yet.

I finally tracked down the source of some of the more radical claims about precision fermentation, and it comes from a think tank RethinkX that released a report claiming that the livestock industry will collapse by 2030, and be replaced by a system they're calling...

Food-as-Software, in which individual molecules engineered by scientists are uploaded to databases – molecular cookbooks that food engineers anywhere in the world can use to design products in the same way that software developers design apps.

I'm finding it hard to be excited about this for some odd reason

Where's the evidence for lower environmental impacts. That's literally what we're here for.

There will be an increase in the amount of electricity used in the new food system as the production facilities that underpin it rely on electricity to operate.

well that doesn't sound good.

This will, however, be offset by reductions in energy use elsewhere along the value chain. For example, since modern meat and dairy products will be produced in a sterile environment where the risk of contamination by pathogens is low, the need for refrigeration in storage and retail will decrease significantly.

Oh, so it will be better for the Earth because...we won't need to refrigerate. ????????

Oh Lord Jesus give me some numerical values.

Modern foods will be about 10 times more efficient than a cow at converting feed into end products because a cow needs energy via feed to maintain and build its body over time. Less feed consumed means less land required to grow it, which means less water is used and less waste is produced. The savings are dramatic – more than 10-25 times less feedstock, 10 times less water, five times less energy and 100 times less land.

There is nothing else in this report that I can find that provides evidence for a lower carbon footprint. Supposedly, an egg white protein produced through a similar process has been found to reduce environmental impacts, but mostly everything seems very speculative.

And crucially none of these estimations are taking into account the enormous cost and resource investment of constructing large factories that use this technology in the first place (existing use is mostly for pharmaceutical purposes)

It seems like there are more tech startups attempting to use this technology to create food than individual scientific papers investigating whether it's a good idea. Seriously, Google Scholar and JSTOR have almost nothing. The tech of the sort that RethinkX is describing barely exists.

Apparently Liberation Labs is planning to build the first large-scale precision fermentation facility in Richmond, Indiana come 2024 because of the presence of "a workforce experienced in manufacturing"

And I just looked up Richmond, Indiana and apparently, as of RIGHT NOW, the town is in the aftermath of a huge fire at a plastics recycling plant and is full of toxic debris containing asbestos and the air is full of toxic VOCs and hydrogen cyanide. ???????????? So that's how having a robust industrial sector is working out for them so far.

[thejaymo]

e360: How did the sites look different after the work that you did on them?

Stevenson: They became basically beautiful meadows of native plants that were flowering, and now there are bees and birds and all sorts of life coming through. We had a very high success rate. In three months we saw a more than 50 percent reduction in all [petrochemical] pollutants. And then by the 12-month period, they were pretty much not detectable.

[macgyvermedical]

Harm Reduction Ideas for Substance Use Disorder

Recently I have been listening to a podcast called The Curbsiders Addiction Medicine. If you are a clinician that works even sometimes with people who use substances (every clinician ever), it is a fantastic look at all the harm reduction practices you can use to make these individuals safer. Plus, you get free CME.

I’m hardly going to do the podcast itself justice with this post, but I wanted to share some things I learned from it:

If the dangers of using substances (social and legal consequences, time commitment, health problems, money problems, etc…) was a deterrent, people wouldn’t be doing it. But it’s not. Because uncontrolled substance use is a chronic disease that generally does not get better without treatment. When people are treated, not only do they generally use less, but they have a much lower chance of death and a much higher chance of a happy, productive life- whatever that means for the patient.

Previously (even a few years ago) we hung such treatment on the requirement that people be abstinent from substances in order to receive help. This works for some people, but far from everyone.

The evidence shows that best thing we can do for many individuals is to make their use safer and less of a burden on their life and health. This is called harm reduction, and it WORKS.

Here are some evidence-based ideas for how to help your patients:

Create a space where you are working together with your patient and following your patient’s lead. Do they want to become abstinent? Great! Do they want to use less or use in a more controlled way? Also great! Do they want to continue use in a safer way? You guessed it, also great! Support them in whatever their goal is

Provide or prescribe safe, clean tools of use. Things like clean needles, Pyrex pipes, and straws. This decreases rates of infection and abscesses

Prescribe medications that reduce cravings or reduce/eliminate withdrawal (methadone, buprenorphine, topiramate, bupropion, naltrexone) without requiring abstinence

Teach people safer use practices and safer routes, such as rectal (booty bumping) or oral (parachuting) instead of injection drug use

Prescribe PrEP if people are at risk of HIV without requiring abstinence

Test for and treat the consequences of substance use (such as HIV and Hep C) without requiring abstinence

Provide fentanyl and xylazine test strips so people know what is in the substances they are using and can adjust doses/use pattern accordingly

Recommend Never Use Alone hotlines to prevent overdose death or better yet, take turns using with a buddy

Prescribe naloxone to anyone who uses any substance- nearly all street drugs are contaminated with synthetic opioids and naloxone is an effective way to prevent deaths

People use substances for a reason, especially early in their journey- pain, coping with depression/other mental illness, ADHD, and social issues like being unhoused. Treat the problem if you can find it, and you can help people significantly decrease use or use in a more controlled way

Be aware that return to use (or return to uncontrolled use) is a thing you can plan for with the patient and manage before it even happens

It’s hard sometimes to change the idea of addiction/substance use disorder as something that can only be treated as a reward for staying sober. But thats why so few people seek treatment for it. The evidence does not equivocate. Harm reduction WORKS.

[minimac-mspl]

Control System Of Turbine - Failure & Maintenance

Control System

The turbine control system describes the control over the opening of control valves corresponding to demand signals, and steam flows into the turbine with the help of a governing system that facilitates the operation of the turbo set in an interconnected grid system.

Governing system is responsible for various function such as speed & load control functions, the start-up/shut-down controls, the over-speed control, turbine stress calculation, to control the initial run-up and synchronization of the Unit, to assists in matching the power generated to that demanded by responding to system frequency changes, to regulate the steam control valves position (and hence the load generated)in response to signal from the operator or from the load dispatch Centre, to restrict the speed rise within acceptable limits should the unit get disconnected (islanding) from the lgridoad and some protective trip functions.

With continuous research and developments in modern turbine technology, the following three types of governing system are mainly available nowadays in power plants:

1. Hydraulic: Hydraulic governors have only a speed controller loop. Machine speed is measured and indicated as a primary oil measure. Speed transducer is a centrifugal pump whose discharge pressure is a function of machine speed. This signal is sent to a hydraulic converter, to generate a high-power hydraulic signal for the operation of different control valves. The range of speed control is 2790-3210 rpm. Its speed regulation range (droop)is 7%. HG (typically) cannot be isolated mechanically like EHG.

2. Electrohydraulic: This consists of three control loop speed, load, and pressure. Speed Electronic Transducer is used for measuring the machine speed. This signal is processed electronically and then sent to an Electrohydraulic converter (E-H) for converting the electronic signals into proportional hydraulic signals (I-P converter) for the operation of control valves. It gives a faster response and precise frequency control. The range of speed control is wider (0 – 3210 rpm). Its speed regulation(droop) is 5%.EHG can be mechanically isolated by closing the secondary oil line from the local.

Major devices/component of the above Governing system are:

Remote trip solenoid

Turbine trip gear (main trip valve)

Starting and load limiting devices

Speeder gear

Auxiliary follow-up piston

Follow up piston

Hydraulic amplifier

Electro-Hydraulic convertor

Sequence trimming device

Solenoid for load shedding relay

Block Diagram of EH Governing system

Follow our page and stay updated about Lubrication Reliability - Minimac Systems Pvt Ltd

Oil Lube Flow In The Circuit:

Control Oil: Oil is taken from the AOP/MOP discharge header for the governing system.

Trip/Aux Trip Oil: These two oil circuits are established through main trip valves under reset condition.

Start-Up/Aux Start-Up Oil: These two oil circuits are established to peak pressure through starting device at 0% position and pressure started reducing when the position of the starting device is raised.

Aux Secondary Oil: This oil circuit is the output of the hydraulic governor and input to the hydraulic converter.

Secondary Oil: Output to Hydraulic and Electrohydraulic converter.

Test Oil: This oil circuit is established to test over speed trip device when the turbine is running at rated speed.

Remote trip Solenoid Valves: These are two in nos. and when any turbine trip gets initiated, the solenoids get energized& control oil gets drained through the valves and trips the MTV.

Main Trip Valve: These are two in nos. and called the main trip gear. All the turbine tripping take place through this device under non-trip condition establishes trip & aux trip oil and used for resetting/opening the stop valves and producing HP/IP secondary oil.

Starting device: this device is used for resetting and opening the stop valves and, main trip valves &hydraulic trip devices. this device either be operated manually by handwheel or from remote (MCR) through a motorized actuator.

Speeder gear: This device in combination with starting device forms a hydraulic governor and provides an input hydraulic signal to the hydraulic converter. this device either be operated manually by hand wheel or from remote (MCR) through a motorized actuator.

Hydraulic/Electro-hydraulic converter: amplifies & converts hydraulic /electrical signals to hydraulic signals (HP/IP secondary oil) for the operation of the HP/IP control valve.

Hydraulic trip devices: These devices provide mandatory protections of the turbine by draining aux trip oil. these devices are reset by aux start-up oil.

3.Digital Electrohydraulic: The main function of the DEH control system is to control before starting up (auto judging very hot, hot, warm or cold state), auto-adjusting servo system static relation, turbine latching, speed and load control, protection, supervising and communication. It consists of electronic parts and EH system which controls the speed/load through controlling the openness of all valves. The feature of special controlling on IP start-up mode (HP casing switchover and isolating of HP casing) can perform quick start-up and stable running for a long time with low load at all phases.

This is a modern high-pressure (110 to 180 bar) governing system.

Let’s know how it works. The electrical measuring and processing of signals offer advantages such as flexibility, dynamic stability and simple representation of the complicated functional relationship. The processed electrical signal is introduced at a suitable point in the hydraulic circuit through the electro-hydraulic converter. The hydraulic controls provide the advantages of continuous control of large positioning forces for control valves. The integration of electrical and hydraulic system offers the following advantages:

Exact load frequency droop with high sensitivity

Reliable operation in case of isolation from power grids

Dependable control during load rejection

Low transient and low steady-state speed deviations under all operational conditions

Excellent operational reliability and dependability

Safe operation of the turbo-set in conjunction with the Turbine Stress Evaluator (TSE)/Controller (TSC)

Operating Method Of DEH Governing:

The stop valve for HP/IP will open by the HP fire-resistant oil when the dump valve is closed

The dump valve will close when the trip oil is under pressure

The trip oil is under pressure when the trip solenoid (5,6,7,8 YV placed on the trip block) valve is in a de-energized position and the HP Trip oil header is under pressure

The oil will enter the bottom of the piston through the isolating valve (Supply sol.). Thus, the stop valve opens slowly against the spring force.

In case of a trip, the trip solenoid valves are energized and AST valves de-energize and HP trip oil header is de-pressurized and thus dump valve open to connect the bottom and top ports to drain the oil to LP accumulators

The valve quickly closes due to spring force

After the unit is reset and HP trip oil is formed

The trip solenoid valve is de-energized conditions will give pressurized oil to the dump valve to keep it closed

Pressurized Oil is up to the EH servo valve

The EH Servo valve based on the DEH valve command signal and valve position feedback signal from LVDT will connect the HP Fire resistant oil to the lower part of the piston or lower port to the drain till the matching is achieved

In the case of Trip, the dump valve opens due to energization of the trip solenoid or depressurization of the HP trip fluid header. The dump valve opening leads to the control valve quick closing due to spring force.

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Type Of Control System Loops:

The EHG function consists of mainly following control loops:

1.Speed control loop: In this loop, the speed controller essentially compares the speed reference generated by the speed reference limiter circuit and the actual speed of the turbine and accordingly provides an output for the valve lift controller. This loop only determines the control valve position to adjust turbine speed at setting value before the generator is paralleled to the power system. 2.Power control loop: The task performed in the speed control loop is then transferred to the power control loop or the MSP control loop after synchronization with the system. The steam turbine shall be controlled on this MW-control mode normally. In the event of a drop of grid frequency, the governor valves shall open instantaneously to provide frequency support in the form of additional MW. When the main steam pressure (MSP) control mode is an operation, this MW-controller is tracking to the main steam pressure (MSP) controller. 3.Turbine inlet steam pressure (MSP) control loop: MSP mode (Turbine Follow mode) of operation results in the governing system modulating the steam flow to regulate the steam pressure at a fixed value. The control system shall switch automatically to this mode when faults occur which prevent normal control of the boiler. MSP mode will take over following a drop-in steam pressure of 10% or an increase in pressure of 3%. It shall be possible to manually switch to this mode. When the power control mode is an operation, this steam pressure controller is tracking to the power controller. 4.Steam pressure Limiter control loop: The pressure limiter shall override the governor and progressively reduce the steam flow to the turbine as the steam pressure before the HP steam turbine governing valves drops below a predetermined value in order to limit serve drops in steam temperature. 5.Condenser Vacuum Limiter control loop: This limiting controller shall override the governor and progressively reduce the steam flow to the turbine as the condenser vacuum falls over a predetermined range in an effort to maintain the condenser vacuum at this value. The setting shall be adjustable. It shall be possible to override the device during vacuum raising and it shall not come into operation below 1000 rpm. 6.Control valve (CV) position control loop: An output from the above loops is given to the CV position control loop as its setting. Consequently, it adjusts the CV position in accordance with its characteristic curves respectively. This portion outputs the opening command to the Electro-hydraulic (E/H) converter mounted on each CV separately. Due to each E/H converter having two magnet coils, two separate signal (±10V) lines are connected to them.

Valve Comprised In The EHG Circuit:

Turbine speed control, load control, load shedding relay control and emergency control are carried out by open and close action of each:

Main Steam Stop Valve (MSSV)

Main Steam Control Valve (MSCV)

Reheat Steam Stop Valve (RSSV)

Reheat Steam Control Valve (RSCV)

Most of the failure-to-trip conditions can be attributed to five basic problems.

Steam deposits on the valve stem (or stems)

Lubrication deposits (i.e., soaps, dirt, detergents, etc.) in the top works of the valve exposed to the elements

Mechanical failures of the valve resulting from bent stems, either in the valve proper or the upper works, damaged split couplings, etc., all within about a 6" area near the centre of the valve mechanism

Galling of the piston in the hydraulic latch cylinder

Jamming of the screw spindle in the larger cylinder-type valve design due to forcing by operations personnel

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Servo And Proportional Control Valves:

Failures of control valves have resulted in a very expensive loss of production and downtime to many energy generation companies. This led to the increasing use of servo and proportional control valves in modern hydraulic control systems. These devices are inherently at the critical stage of controlling the generating process and quality of the end product.

The most critical factor of their failures is the contamination of the hydraulic fluid with regard to cleanliness and chemical composition like water content and various forms of break down that can occur due to chemical contamination, excessive heat or working of the fluid, inappropriate filters for the valve etc.

To achieve high reliability and asset life for a longer time, it is important to closely evaluate the design of filtration and its effects, components included and circuit layout to achieve the optimum solution. The key system elements are Servo valves and proportional valves, Pumps and motors and Ancillary valves and components.

The types of failure on the basis of contamination can be broadly classified into:

Short term failure: This type of failure comes with no warning which results in an unplanned shutdown of the plant, catastrophic for equipment, production loss. The main causes are jamming of the spool or plugging of the orifice.

Particle Jamming: In this mechanism, contaminant gets lodge in the fine clearances between the spool and body, the particles became wedged in the spool blocking control orifices to cause a ‘hard over’ condition or loss of control pressure. To solve this type of problems by filtration, the size of clearances and driving forces to overcome particles should be considered. This causes permanent damage to control lands of the valve which means expensive repair or replacement with a new one

Silting: Silting refer to a phenomenon where a spool is being held in a fixed position with high pressure across the lands which results in a gradual build-up of fine ‘silt’ particles that can lock the spool within 5-10 minutes. poppet type solenoid valves are used in safety circuits where long stand times can be involved. A conventional solenoid (or the return spring) will not move the spool after 3-5 minutes

Long term failure: This type of failure directly impacts system accuracy and repeatability. It results from the gradual build-up of other ‘varnish’ or silt type contaminant that degrades the control qualities of the valve such as threshold and hysteresis, wear/erosion of valve parts. Long term effects cannot be eliminated, however, by proper design, it is possible to maximise the useful life of the valve before service or repair is required. This requires the effective application of silt level filtration.

Valve Design:

Control system performance, the filtration requirements and likely contamination sensitivity are dependent on how the best valve design is selected. Design goals should be balanced with component details, component costs and overall system costs. A good understanding of how and why the valve works will provide maximum benefits to the overall design solution. There are three principal areas to be considered for the best designing of a valve:

Internal forces: Understanding the forces within the valve that provide for correct operation and those that resist operation, is most valuable for understanding optimal filtration requirements. Forces determine both short term and long-term performance for contamination sensitivity and threshold/resolution.

Spool position control: For both servo valves and proportional valves the spool is capable of being positioned anywhere over its total designed stroke. How the spool is moved and held in that position will have a direct influence on the cost of manufacture, system accuracy and contamination sensitivity. Three methods used are

Open-loop or non-feedback

Mechanical feedback (MFB)

Electrical feedback (EFB)

Design tolerances: Finer tolerances will be more susceptible to wear and the potential for particle jamming. They will be an important factor for the evaluation of either servo valves or proportional valves with regard to filtration design. For both short and long term functionalities below are few manufacturing objectives such as:

Nozzle diameters and exit clearances

Spool diametral clearance

Spool travel - from 0.250mm for high-performance servo valves to 5-10mm for proportional valves. A shorter stroke means faster response, but finer manufacturing tolerances.

Spool control land overlap - which ranges from 10-20% overlap proportional valves to ‘axis cut’ (zero overlaps) servo valves which require special protection of the lands to maintain performance. Zero overlap valves are used in the pilot section of some proportional valves so that protection requirements can be similar for parts of servo valves and proportional valves.

Control Oil - Fire Resistant Fluid (FRF):

A fire-resistant control fluid (FRF) is used in control and governing systems. The use of fire-resistant control fluid for turbine control and protection systems reduces the risk of fire. This is due to the higher ignition temperature (compared to mineral oil) in case of leaks.

It shall not cause corrosion to Steel, Copper and its alloys, Zinc, Tin or Aluminium (compatibility to be checked)

It shall be continuously regenerated with Fuller’s earth, ICB resins or an equivalent regeneration agent

It must not cause any erosion or corrosion on the edges of the control elements

It must be shear-stable. It should not contain any viscosity index improver

FRF leaking from the system, if any, must not ignite or burn in contact with hot surfaces (up to 550 degrees C)

It must be capable of withstanding continuous operating temperatures of 75 °C without physical or chemical degradation

It must be miscible with traces (max. 3 % by vol.) of TXP of another brand (without deterioration)

The air release of the FRF should not deteriorate in presence of Fluoroelastomer seals and packing used in the FRF system

It must be free of ortho-cresol compounds

It must not pose a safety or health hazard to the persons working with it, provided that the requisite hygiene regulations are observed

Contamination In FRF/Degradation Of Phosphate Ester

Though Phosphate ester fluid is designed for the long life of service of around 20 years if maintained properly, However, contamination or abuse in the oil because of poorly lubrication practices can degrade the oil life and reliability of the machine. Fluid degradation results in sticking valves, eroded servo valves, plugged filters and/or blocked servo valve strainers. The major contaminant or factor of oil degradation are described below:

Water Contamination This is the most common and dangerous contaminant which frequently dictates the service life of FRF fluid. Phosphate ester has the tendency to hydrolyze which means breaking down into acid and alcohol and this process accelerates with increasing temperature and is catalyzed by the presence of strong acids and some metals.

Acid formation Uncontrolled generation of acidic products is harmful to the life and performance of phosphate esters. strong acids are also chemically reactive and can form metal soaps or salts which adversely affect foaming and volume resistivity, the latter being used to assess the potential for servo-valve erosion. This soaps precipitates in servo valves and cause stickiness.

Lowering of Resistivity Resistivity is a critical performance indicator for phosphate ester fluid quality. Low resistivity values are associated with electrokinetic wear, a very common failure mechanism of servo (MOOG) valves.

Solid Contamination This particulate contamination is responsible for fluid darkening and is generally produced from micro-dieseling, which is a type of high-temperature fluid breakdown caused by air release issues. Solid contaminants of more than (>4) micron are measured by ISO4460 but less than (4) microns are not being detected. On investigation, 90% of total solid contamination in EHC fluids is below 4 microns which results in plugged filters, blocked servo valve strainers.

Oxidation degradation Oxidation the most dangerous process which occurs due to contamination gives output in the form of heat. Oxidative degradation results in the production of a range of strong and weak acids and from very low molecular weight hydrocarbons that may plate out as varnish to higher molecular weight hydrocarbons or polyphosphates present as sludge that can increase fluid viscosity and reduce resistivity while blocking filters and causing valve sticking. External sources such as a steam line, hot/molten metal or a welding torch located close to the hydraulic line provide heat to the fluid. The difference between internal ‘hot spots’ is that it occurs when the fluid is in circulation (except for the fluid being heated up in the tank) and external heat sources occur when the fluid is static.

Aeration (Thermal Stability and Pyrolysis) The presence of a small amount of dissolved oxygen will result in degradation at lower temperatures - particularly in the presence of metals - and apparent changes in the physical/chemical properties of the fluid may be due to oxidation rather than pure thermal breakdown.

Maintenance Of FRF Fluid: The fluid is pressurized, subjected to elevated temperatures, flows through fine clearances and is exposed to contaminants including water, dirt and air. Its maintenance should be focused on Keeping the fluid dry, clean and purified, checking material compatibility issues and employ regular fluid condition monitoring, following the guidelines for handling control fluid and for treatment of control fluid systems, Preservative Agents in Control Fluid System, precautions to Ensure Compatibility of the Control Fluid with other Materials, the procedure for sampling and analysis programs. Below is a chart summing up the maintenance properties:

Purification:

Ion Exchange System Ion exchange resins have become a preferred form of treatment for fire-resistant fluids used in EHC systems. This treatment has overcome the practice of the fuller’s earth to control acidity generation in a "synthetic" fluid. Weak Base Anionic (WBA) resin in the hydroxide form could quickly reduce the acidity while a strong acid cationic resin (SAC) would, surprisingly, reduce the metal soap content. In order to reduce the amount of water released by the resins, they were dried at 80��C to a level of ~5% before use as a mixture in the existing filter housing. Over a period of about 1-2 months, the properties of the fluid returned to close to those of the new fluid. The below table shows function of commercially available type resin:

The followings points should be considered for the sampling of FRF oil:

Always perform sampling at the same location directly from the system

Recirculate the fire-resistant fluid long enough prior to sampling to avoid settling and give a homogeneous sample

Always perform sampling while the FRF system is in operation

Flush the sampling point prior to sampling by draining about 10 litres of fire-resistant fluid into a clean receptacle; return this into the system after sampling

Allow about 10 litres of fire-resistant fluid to pass through the sampling point before performing sampling by filling the fire-resistant fluid directly into the cleaned ground-glass flask

Do not use aids such as syringes or beakers

Always put identification-mark on the specimens uniquely and durably

Complete the sampling records and send them to the analyzing laboratory together with the FRF sample

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Conclusion:

The performance of Hydraulic system plays a vital role in the power generation and for its high-performance many factors must be considered importantly like understanding the valve design, setting & maintaining cleanliness objective, regular monitoring, the adaption of effective purification or filtration methods, monitoring of filter quality and replacement elements etc. Good filtration will always give the lowest machine running cost and greatest reliability for the end-user of hydraulic systems. Below are the major benefits of reconditioning of oil:

Extend oil life

Increased machine reliability

Reduced environmental contamination

Cost-saving on oils replacement

Time and effort saved for oil change out

Decreased waste disposal cost

Low carbon emission

Sustainable development

Call +91 7030901267 & speak to our Technical Experts and save Maintenance Cost.

Author: Mr Yogesh Kumar is a Mechanical Engineer with vast working experience of 11 years in Power plants. He has completed PGDC in Thermal Power Plant Engineering from NPTI. He is a certified Machinery Lubrication Analysis (MLA II) from the International Council of Machinery Lubrication (ICML), Vibration Analyst Level II from MOBIUS Australia, ISNT certified NDT Level II professional in RT, UT, DPT, MPI, BOE (Boiler Operation Engineer) Certification.

Co-Author: Ms Preeti Prasad is a Chemical Engineer with working experience in Refinery and various other sectors in connection with Lubrication Consultancy. She is a certified Machinery Lubrication Technician (MTL I) from the International Council of Machinery Lubrication (ICML).

Reference Taken:

Contamination Control - A Hydraulic OEM Perspective: Workshop on Total Contamination Control Centre for Machine Condition Monitoring Monash University, August 1997.

ASTM Paper on IX treatment, Whitepapers on Phosphate Ester from EPT clean

National Power Training Institute

Other documents from Scribd.com

[ccuunnttbbooyyss]

The Resort (Part 1)

THIS IS AN URGENT ANNOUNCEMENT TO ALL THOSE IN THE [REDACTED] & [REDACTED] AREAS

Hello,

It has come to our attention that an unfortunate accident at one of our chemical treatment plans has occurred on the [REDACTED]st of [REDACTED] 2023, resulting in the contamination of the water supply in the above mentioned areas for a period of approximately 3 hours and 10 minutes.

A statement has been issued to water providers by The Company™️ and a number of anti-transformative chemicals have been released to counteract the imbalance.

However, the damage has been done and we wish to report on it as such.

As you may know, some of the affected water infiltrated the [REDACTED] Beach Resort where it unwittingly transformed multiple male patrons into what is colloquially referred to as "Cuntboys". IE- Men with a fully functional vagina, uterus, ovaries, etc. Others not as diligently exposed to the chemicals did not experience full "Cuntboy-ification" as it has been deemed.

This transformation is reported to have first occurred with a sudden and dramatic increase in the size of the lower extremities, glutes, lower back muscles and an initial reduction in penis and testicle size.

This reportedly occurred throughout the premises, including the pool's filtration system, the resort's water system (showers, baths, commercial water taps), and available on-tap drinking water.

The following changes consisted of what we are dubbing a "hyper-fertile cycle" where the excess chemical exposure was processed into a mixture of testosterone, dopamine and oxytocin. This resulted in a dramatically increased libido.

Fortunately the spread of the affected was contained within the resort and secondary exposure (either through sexual fluids or otherwise) was rendered ineffectual as the transformative chemicals were able to penetrate the skin barrier in less than 0.2 microseconds). This resulted in numerous impregnations or otherwise sexual encounters in and around the location, of which have been documented.

We encourage all those affected either through direct exposure or through coupling and secondary exposure to report to one of our branches to undergo a full physical exam and analysis.

We also encourage all currently, or presumed to be, pregnant to not terminate the pregnancy as we wish to ascertain valuable research data on the growth of the foetus within this timeframe.

We hope to reveal more information to the public as it becomes known.

Regards,

The Company.

~~~

You smirk as the commercial comes to an end, the broadcaster for the local news station thanking The Company for their transparency regarding the situation and continuing with more news on the recent baby boom caused through the accident.

You couldn't pay attention for long though, not as the hot little cuntboy you picked up from the resort was busy swallowing every inch of your enhanced cock down his throat.

You fisted his hair, shoving him down to push his nose in your pubes, loving how his throat spasmed around your dick and the gurgling sound that came out of his tight throat.

"You hear that baby, they wanna give you a checkup."

A soft whimper comes out as the only response. He looks up at you, tear-filled baby blues staring into yours. He's been working your cock for hours, thoroughly content with kneeling between your spread thighs and swallowing every enhanced load you can give.

"Yeah I know you're pregnant. They just wanna make sure you can give me a while lot more."

A more pleased sound comes out as he resumes his enthusiastic sucking. You're sure that's his fifth load in as many hours.

You sigh as the hot cum shoots up your rock hard dick. You might as well put off that appointment till tomorrow...

Story in collaboration with @maleagetransformation , Part 2 over on his account!

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved on our archive

SARS-CoV-2 is now circulating out of control worldwide. The only major limitation on transmission is the immune environment the virus faces. The disease it causes, COVID-19, is now a risk faced by most people as part of daily life.

While some are better than others, no national or regional government is making serious efforts towards infection prevention and control, and it seems likely this laissez-faire policy will continue for the foreseeable future. The social, political, and economic movements that worked to achieve this mass infection environment can rejoice at their success.

Those schooled in public health, immunology or working on the front line of healthcare provision know we face an uncertain future, and are aware the implications of recent events stretch far beyond SARS-CoV-2. The shifts that have taken place in attitudes and public health policy will likely damage a key pillar that forms the basis of modern civilized society, one that was built over the last two centuries; the expectation of a largely uninterrupted upwards trajectory of ever-improving health and quality of life, largely driven by the reduction and elimination of infectious diseases that plagued humankind for thousands of years. In the last three years, that trajectory has reversed.

The upward trajectory of public health in the last two centuries Control of infectious disease has historically been a priority for all societies. Quarantine has been in common use since at least the Bronze Age and has been the key method for preventing the spread of infectious diseases ever since. The word “quarantine” itself derives from the 40-day isolation period for ships and crews that was implemented in Europe during the late Middle Ages to prevent the introduction of bubonic plague epidemics into cities.

Modern public health traces its roots to the middle of the 19th century thanks to converging scientific developments in early industrial societies:

The germ theory of diseases was firmly established in the mid-19th century, in particular after Louis Pasteur disproved the spontaneous generation hypothesis. If diseases spread through transmission chains between individual humans or from the environment/animals to humans, then it follows that those transmission chains can be interrupted, and the spread stopped. The science of epidemiology appeared, its birth usually associated with the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak in London during which the British physician John Snow identified contaminated water as the source of cholera, pointing to improved sanitation as the way to stop cholera epidemics. Vaccination technology began to develop, initially against smallpox, and the first mandatory smallpox vaccination campaigns began, starting in England in the 1850s.

The early industrial era generated horrendous workplace and living conditions for working class populations living in large industrial cities, dramatically reducing life expectancy and quality of life (life expectancy at birth in key industrial cities in the middle of the 19th century was often in the low 30s or even lower). This in turn resulted in a recognition that such environmental factors affect human health and life spans. The long and bitter struggle for workers’ rights in subsequent decades resulted in much improved working conditions, workplace safety regulations, and general sanitation, and brought sharp increases in life expectancy and quality of life, which in turn had positive impacts on productivity and wealth.

Florence Nightingale reemphasized the role of ventilation in healing and preventing illness, ‘The very first canon of nursing… : keep the air he breathes as pure as the external air, without chilling him,’ a maxim that influenced building design at the time.

These trends continued in the 20th century, greatly helped by further technological and scientific advances. Many diseases – diphtheria, pertussis, hepatitis B, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, etc. – became things of the past thanks to near-universal highly effective vaccinations, while others that used to be common are no longer of such concern for highly developed countries in temperate climates – malaria, typhus, typhoid, leprosy, cholera, tuberculosis, and many others – primarily thanks to improvements in hygiene and the implementation of non-pharmaceutical measures for their containment.

Furthermore, the idea that infectious diseases should not just be reduced, but permanently eliminated altogether began to be put into practice in the second half of the 20th century on a global level, and much earlier locally. These programs were based on the obvious consideration that if an infectious agent is driven to extinction, the incalculable damage to people’s health and the overall economy by a persisting and indefinite disease burden will also be eliminated.

The ambition of local elimination grew into one of global eradication for smallpox, which was successfully eliminated from the human population in the 1970s (this had already been achieved locally in the late 19th century by some countries), after a heroic effort to find and contain the last remaining infectious individuals. The other complete success was rinderpest in cattle9,10, globally eradicated in the early 21st century.

When the COVID-19 pandemic started, global eradication programs were very close to succeeding for two other diseases – polio and dracunculiasis. Eradication is also globally pursued for other diseases, such as yaws, and regionally for many others, e.g. lymphatic filariasis, onchocerciasis, measles and rubella. The most challenging diseases are those that have an external reservoir outside the human population, especially if they are insect borne, and in particular those carried by mosquitos. Malaria is the primary example, but despite these difficulties, eradication of malaria has been a long-standing global public health goal and elimination has been achieved in temperate regions of the globe, even though it involved the ecologically destructive widespread application of polluting chemical pesticides to reduce the populations of the vectors. Elimination is also a public goal for other insect borne diseases such as trypanosomiasis.

In parallel with pursuing maximal reduction and eventual eradication of the burden of existing endemic infectious diseases, humanity has also had to battle novel infectious diseases40, which have been appearing at an increased rate over recent decades. Most of these diseases are of zoonotic origin, and the rate at which they are making the jump from wildlife to humans is accelerating, because of the increased encroachment on wildlife due to expanding human populations and physical infrastructure associated with human activity, the continued destruction of wild ecosystems that forces wild animals towards closer human contact, the booming wildlife trade, and other such trends.

Because it is much easier to stop an outbreak when it is still in its early stages of spreading through the population than to eradicate an endemic pathogen, the governing principle has been that no emerging infectious disease should be allowed to become endemic. This goal has been pursued reasonably successfully and without controversy for many decades.

The most famous newly emerging pathogens were the filoviruses (Ebola, Marburg), the SARS and MERS coronaviruses, and paramyxoviruses like Nipah. These gained fame because of their high lethality and potential for human-to-human spread, but they were merely the most notable of many examples.

Such epidemics were almost always aggressively suppressed. Usually, these were small outbreaks, and because highly pathogenic viruses such as Ebola cause very serious sickness in practically all infected people, finding and isolating the contagious individuals is a manageable task. The largest such epidemic was the 2013-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, when a filovirus spread widely in major urban centers for the first time. Containment required a wartime-level mobilization, but that was nevertheless achieved, even though there were nearly 30,000 infections and more than 11,000 deaths.

SARS was also contained and eradicated from the human population back in 2003-04, and the same happened every time MERS made the jump from camels to humans, as well as when there were Nipah outbreaks in Asia.

The major counterexample of a successful establishment in the human population of a novel highly pathogenic virus is HIV. HIV is a retrovirus, and as such it integrates into the host genome and is thus nearly impossible to eliminate from the body and to eradicate from the population (unless all infected individuals are identified and prevented from infecting others for the rest of their lives). However, HIV is not an example of the containment principle being voluntarily abandoned as the virus had made its zoonotic jump and established itself many decades before its eventual discovery and recognition, and long before the molecular tools that could have detected and potentially fully contained it existed.

Still, despite all these containment success stories, the emergence of a new pathogen with pandemic potential was a well understood and frequently discussed threat, although influenza viruses rather than coronaviruses were often seen as the most likely culprit. The eventual appearance of SARS-CoV-2 should therefore not have been a huge surprise, and should have been met with a full mobilization of the technical tools and fundamental public health principles developed over the previous decades.

The ecological context One striking property of many emerging pathogens is how many of them come from bats. While the question of whether bats truly harbor more viruses than other mammals in proportion to their own species diversity (which is the second highest within mammals after rodents) is not fully settled yet, many novel viruses do indeed originate from bats, and the ecological and physiological characteristics of bats are highly relevant for understanding the situation that Homo sapiens finds itself in right now.

Another startling property of bats and their viruses is how highly pathogenic to humans (and other mammals) many bat viruses are, while bats themselves are not much affected (only rabies is well established to cause serious harm to bats). Why bats seem to carry so many such pathogens, and how they have adapted so well to coexisting with them, has been a long-standing puzzle and although we do not have a definitive answer, some general trends have become clear.

Bats are the only truly flying mammals and have been so for many millions of years. Flying has resulted in a number of specific adaptations, one of them being the tolerance towards a very high body temperature (often on the order of 42-43ºC). Bats often live in huge colonies, literally touching each other, and, again, have lived in conditions of very high density for millions of years. Such densities are rare among mammals and are certainly not the native condition of humans (human civilization and our large dense cities are a very recent phenomenon on evolutionary time scales). Bats are also quite long-lived for such small mammals – some fruit bats can live more than 35 years and even small cave dwelling species can live about a decade.

These are characteristics that might have on one hand facilitated the evolution of a considerable set of viruses associated with bat populations. In order for a non-latent respiratory virus to maintain itself, a minimal population size is necessary. For example, it is hypothesized that measles requires a minimum population size of 250-300,000 individuals. And bats have existed in a state of high population densities for a very long time, which might explain the high diversity of viruses that they carry. In addition, the long lifespan of many bat species means that their viruses may have to evolve strategies to overcome adaptive immunity and frequently reinfect previously infected individuals as opposed to the situation in short-lived species in which populations turn over quickly (with immunologically naive individuals replacing the ones that die out).

On the other hand, the selective pressure that these viruses have exerted on bats may have resulted in the evolution of various resistance and/or tolerance mechanisms in bats themselves, which in turn have driven the evolution of counter strategies in their viruses, leading them to be highly virulent for other species. Bats certainly appear to be physiologically more tolerant towards viruses that are otherwise highly virulent to other mammals. Several explanations for this adaptation have been proposed, chief among them a much more powerful innate immunity and a tolerance towards infections that does not lead to the development of the kind of hyperinflammatory reactions observed in humans, the high body temperature of bats in flight, and others.

The notable strength of bat innate immunity is often explained by the constitutively active interferon response that has been reported for some bat species. It is possible that this is not a universal characteristic of all bats – only a few species have been studied – but it provides a very attractive mechanism for explaining both how bats prevent the development of severe systemic viral infections in their bodies and how their viruses in turn would have evolved powerful mechanisms to silence the interferon response, making them highly pathogenic for other mammals.

The tolerance towards infection is possibly rooted in the absence of some components of the signaling cascades leading to hyperinflammatory reactions and the dampened activity of others.

An obvious ecological parallel can be drawn between bats and humans – just as bats live in dense colonies, so now do modern humans. And we may now be at a critical point in the history of our species, in which our ever-increasing ecological footprint has brought us in close contact with bats in a way that was much rarer in the past. Our population is connected in ways that were previously unimaginable. A novel virus can make the zoonotic jump somewhere in Southeast Asia and a carrier of it can then be on the other side of the globe a mere 24-hours later, having encountered thousands of people in airports and other mass transit systems. As a result, bat pathogens are now being transferred from bat populations to the human population in what might prove to be the second major zoonotic spillover event after the one associated with domestication of livestock and pets a few thousand years ago.

Unfortunately for us, our physiology is not suited to tolerate these new viruses. Bats have adapted to live with them over many millions of years. Humans have not undergone the same kind of adaptation and cannot do so on any timescale that will be of use to those living now, nor to our immediate descendants.

Simply put, humans are not bats, and the continuous existence and improvement of what we now call “civilization” depends on the same basic public health and infectious disease control that saw life expectancy in high-income countries more than double to 85 years. This is a challenge that will only increase in the coming years, because the trends that are accelerating the rate of zoonotic transfer of pathogens are certain to persist.

Given this context, it is as important now to maintain the public health principle that no new dangerous pathogens should be allowed to become endemic and that all novel infectious disease outbreaks must be suppressed as it ever was.

The death of public health and the end of epidemiological comfort It is also in this context that the real gravity of what has happened in the last three years emerges.

After HIV, SARS-CoV-2 is now the second most dangerous infectious disease agent that is 'endemic' to the human population on a global scale. And yet not only was it allowed to become endemic, but mass infection was outright encouraged, including by official public health bodies in numerous countries.

The implications of what has just happened have been missed by most, so let’s spell them out explicitly.

We need to be clear why containment of SARS-CoV-2 was actively sabotaged and eventually abandoned. It has absolutely nothing to do with the “impossibility” of achieving it. In fact, the technical problem of containing even a stealthily spreading virus such as SARS-CoV-2 is fully solved, and that solution was successfully applied in practice for years during the pandemic.

The list of countries that completely snuffed out outbreaks, often multiple times, includes Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Bhutan, Cuba, China, and a few others, with China having successfully contained hundreds of separate outbreaks, before finally giving up in late 2022.

The algorithm for containment is well established – passively break transmission chains through the implementation of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as limiting human contacts, high quality respirator masks, indoor air filtration and ventilation, and others, while aggressively hunting down active remaining transmission chains through traditional contact tracing and isolation methods combined with the powerful new tool of population-scale testing.

Understanding of airborne transmission and institution of mitigation measures, which have heretofore not been utilized in any country, will facilitate elimination, even with the newer, more transmissible variants. Any country that has the necessary resources (or is provided with them) can achieve full containment within a few months. In fact, currently this would be easier than ever before because of the accumulated widespread multiple recent exposures to the virus in the population suppressing the effective reproduction number (Re). For the last 18 months or so we have been seeing a constant high plateau of cases with undulating waves, but not the major explosions of infections with Re reaching 3-4 that were associated with the original introduction of the virus in 2020 and with the appearance of the first Omicron variants in late 2021.

It would be much easier to use NPIs to drive Re to much below 1 and keep it there until elimination when starting from Re around 1.2-1.3 than when it was over 3, and this moment should be used, before another radically new serotype appears and takes us back to those even more unpleasant situations. This is not a technical problem, but one of political and social will. As long as leadership misunderstands or pretends to misunderstand the link between increased mortality, morbidity and poorer economic performance and the free transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the impetus will be lacking to take the necessary steps to contain this damaging virus.

Political will is in short supply because powerful economic and corporate interests have been pushing policymakers to let the virus spread largely unchecked through the population since the very beginning of the pandemic. The reasons are simple. First, NPIs hurt general economic activity, even if only in the short term, resulting in losses on balance sheets. Second, large-scale containment efforts of the kind we only saw briefly in the first few months of the pandemic require substantial governmental support for all the people who need to pause their economic activity for the duration of effort. Such an effort also requires large-scale financial investment in, for example, contact tracing and mass testing infrastructure and providing high-quality masks. In an era dominated by laissez-faire economic dogma, this level of state investment and organization would have set too many unacceptable precedents, so in many jurisdictions it was fiercely resisted, regardless of the consequences for humanity and the economy.

None of these social and economic predicaments have been resolved. The unofficial alliance between big business and dangerous pathogens that was forged in early 2020 has emerged victorious and greatly strengthened from its battle against public health, and is poised to steamroll whatever meager opposition remains for the remainder of this, and future pandemics.

The long-established principles governing how we respond to new infectious diseases have now completely changed – the precedent has been established that dangerous emerging pathogens will no longer be contained, but instead permitted to ‘ease’ into widespread circulation. The intent to “let it rip” in the future is now being openly communicated. With this change in policy comes uncertainty about acceptable lethality. Just how bad will an infectious disease have to be to convince any government to mobilize a meaningful global public health response?

We have some clues regarding that issue from what happened during the initial appearance of the Omicron “variant” (which was really a new serotype) of SARS-CoV-2. Despite some experts warning that a vaccine-only approach would be doomed to fail, governments gambled everything on it. They were then faced with the brute fact of viral evolution destroying their strategy when a new serotype emerged against which existing vaccines had little effect in terms of blocking transmission. The reaction was not to bring back NPIs but to give up, seemingly regardless of the consequences.

Critically, those consequences were unknown when the policy of no intervention was adopted within days of the appearance of Omicron. All previous new SARS-CoV-2 variants had been deadlier than the original Wuhan strain, with the eventually globally dominant Delta variant perhaps as much as 4× as deadly. Omicron turned out to be the exception, but again, that was not known with any certainty when it was allowed to run wild through populations. What would have happened if it had followed the same pattern as Delta?

In the USA, for example, the worst COVID-19 wave was the one in the winter of 2020-21, at the peak of which at least 3,500 people were dying daily (the real number was certainly higher because of undercounting due to lack of testing and improper reporting). The first Omicron BA.1 wave saw the second-highest death tolls, with at least 2,800 dying per day at its peak. Had Omicron been as intrinsically lethal as Delta, we could have easily seen a 4-5× higher peak than January 2021, i.e. as many as 12–15,000 people dying a day. Given that we only had real data on Omicron’s intrinsic lethality after the gigantic wave of infections was unleashed onto the population, we have to conclude that 12–15,000 dead a day is now a threshold that will not force the implementation of serious NPIs for the next problematic COVID-19 serotype.

Logically, it follows that it is also a threshold that will not result in the implementation of NPIs for any other emerging pathogens either. Because why should SARS-CoV-2 be special?

We can only hope that we will never see the day when such an epidemic hits us but experience tells us such optimism is unfounded. The current level of suffering caused by COVID-19 has been completely normalized even though such a thing was unthinkable back in 2019. Populations are largely unaware of the long-term harms the virus is causing to those infected, of the burden on healthcare, increased disability, mortality and reduced life expectancy. Once a few even deadlier outbreaks have been shrugged off by governments worldwide, the baseline of what is considered “acceptable” will just gradually move up and even more unimaginable losses will eventually enter the “acceptable” category. There can be no doubt, from a public health perspective, we are regressing.

We had a second, even more worrying real-life example of what the future holds with the global spread of the MPX virus (formerly known as “monkeypox” and now called “Mpox”) in 2022. MPX is a close relative to the smallpox VARV virus and is endemic to Central and Western Africa, where its natural hosts are mostly various rodent species, but on occasions it infects humans too, with the rate of zoonotic transfer increasing over recent decades. It has usually been characterized by fairly high mortality – the CFR (Case Fatality Rate) has been ∼3.6% for the strain that circulates in Nigeria and ∼10% for the one in the Congo region, i.e. much worse than SARS-CoV-2. In 2022, an unexpected global MPX outbreak developed, with tens of thousands of confirmed cases in dozens of countries. Normally, this would be a huge cause for alarm, for several reasons.

First, MPX itself is a very dangerous disease. Second, universal smallpox vaccination ended many decades ago with the success of the eradication program, leaving the population born after that completely unprotected. Third, lethality in orthopoxviruses is, in fact, highly variable – VARV itself had a variola major strain, with as much as ∼30% CFR, and a less deadly variola minor variety with CFR ∼1%, and there was considerable variation within variola major too. It also appears that high pathogenicity often evolves from less pathogenic strains through reductive evolution - the loss of certain genes something that can happen fairly easily, may well have happened repeatedly in the past, and may happen again in the future, a scenario that has been repeatedly warned about for decades. For these reasons, it was unthinkable that anyone would just shrug off a massive MPX outbreak – it is already bad enough as it is, but allowing it to become endemic means it can one day evolve towards something functionally equivalent to smallpox in its impact.

And yet that is exactly what happened in 2022 – barely any measures were taken to contain the outbreak, and countries simply reclassified MPX out of the “high consequence infectious disease” category in order to push the problem away, out of sight and out of mind. By chance, it turned out that this particular outbreak did not spark a global pandemic, and it was also characterized, for poorly understood reasons, by an unusually low CFR, with very few people dying. But again, that is not the information that was available at the start of the outbreak, when in a previous, interventionist age of public health, resources would have been mobilized to stamp it out in its infancy, but, in the age of laissez-faire, were not. MPX is now circulating around the world and represents a future threat of uncontrolled transmission resulting in viral adaptation to highly efficient human-to-human spread combined with much greater disease severity.

While some are better than others, no national or regional government is making serious efforts towards infection prevention and control, and it seems likely this laissez-faire policy will continue for the foreseeable future. The social, political, and economic movements that worked to achieve this mass infection environment can rejoice at their success.

Those schooled in public health, immunology or working on the front line of healthcare provision know we face an uncertain future, and are aware the implications of recent events stretch far beyond SARS-CoV-2. The shifts that have taken place in attitudes and public health policy will likely damage a key pillar that forms the basis of modern civilized society, one that was built over the last two centuries; the expectation of a largely uninterrupted upwards trajectory of ever-improving health and quality of life, largely driven by the reduction and elimination of infectious diseases that plagued humankind for thousands of years. In the last three years, that trajectory has reversed.

The upward trajectory of public health in the last two centuries Control of infectious disease has historically been a priority for all societies. Quarantine has been in common use since at least the Bronze Age and has been the key method for preventing the spread of infectious diseases ever since. The word “quarantine” itself derives from the 40-day isolation period for ships and crews that was implemented in Europe during the late Middle Ages to prevent the introduction of bubonic plague epidemics into cities1.

Rat climbing a ship's rigging. Modern public health traces its roots to the middle of the 19th century thanks to converging scientific developments in early industrial societies:

The germ theory of diseases was firmly established in the mid-19th century, in particular after Louis Pasteur disproved the spontaneous generation hypothesis. If diseases spread through transmission chains between individual humans or from the environment/animals to humans, then it follows that those transmission chains can be interrupted, and the spread stopped. The science of epidemiology appeared, its birth usually associated with the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak in London during which the British physician John Snow identified contaminated water as the source of cholera, pointing to improved sanitation as the way to stop cholera epidemics. Vaccination technology began to develop, initially against smallpox, and the first mandatory smallpox vaccination campaigns began, starting in England in the 1850s. The early industrial era generated horrendous workplace and living conditions for working class populations living in large industrial cities, dramatically reducing life expectancy and quality of life (life expectancy at birth in key industrial cities in the middle of the 19th century was often in the low 30s or even lower2). This in turn resulted in a recognition that such environmental factors affect human health and life spans. The long and bitter struggle for workers’ rights in subsequent decades resulted in much improved working conditions, workplace safety regulations, and general sanitation, and brought sharp increases in life expectancy and quality of life, which in turn had positive impacts on productivity and wealth. Florence Nightingale reemphasized the role of ventilation in healing and preventing illness, ‘The very first canon of nursing… : keep the air he breathes as pure as the external air, without chilling him,’ a maxim that influenced building design at the time. These trends continued in the 20th century, greatly helped by further technological and scientific advances. Many diseases – diphtheria, pertussis, hepatitis B, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, etc. – became things of the past thanks to near-universal highly effective vaccinations, while others that used to be common are no longer of such concern for highly developed countries in temperate climates – malaria, typhus, typhoid, leprosy, cholera, tuberculosis, and many others – primarily thanks to improvements in hygiene and the implementation of non-pharmaceutical measures for their containment.

Furthermore, the idea that infectious diseases should not just be reduced, but permanently eliminated altogether began to be put into practice in the second half of the 20th century3-5 on a global level, and much earlier locally. These programs were based on the obvious consideration that if an infectious agent is driven to extinction, the incalculable damage to people’s health and the overall economy by a persisting and indefinite disease burden will also be eliminated.

The ambition of local elimination grew into one of global eradication for smallpox, which was successfully eliminated from the human population in the 1970s6 (this had already been achieved locally in the late 19th century by some countries), after a heroic effort to find and contain the last remaining infectious individuals7,8. The other complete success was rinderpest in cattle9,10, globally eradicated in the early 21st century.

When the COVID-19 pandemic started, global eradication programs were very close to succeeding for two other diseases – polio11,12 and dracunculiasis13. Eradication is also globally pursued for other diseases, such as yaws14,15, and regionally for many others, e.g. lymphatic filariasis16,17, onchocerciasis18,19, measles and rubella20-30. The most challenging diseases are those that have an external reservoir outside the human population, especially if they are insect borne, and in particular those carried by mosquitos. Malaria is the primary example, but despite these difficulties, eradication of malaria has been a long-standing global public health goal31-33 and elimination has been achieved in temperate regions of the globe34,35, even though it involved the ecologically destructive widespread application of polluting chemical pesticides36,37 to reduce the populations of the vectors. Elimination is also a public goal for other insect borne diseases such as trypanosomiasis38,39.

In parallel with pursuing maximal reduction and eventual eradication of the burden of existing endemic infectious diseases, humanity has also had to battle novel infectious diseases40, which have been appearing at an increased rate over recent decades41-43. Most of these diseases are of zoonotic origin, and the rate at which they are making the jump from wildlife to humans is accelerating, because of the increased encroachment on wildlife due to expanding human populations and physical infrastructure associated with human activity, the continued destruction of wild ecosystems that forces wild animals towards closer human contact, the booming wildlife trade, and other such trends.

Because it is much easier to stop an outbreak when it is still in its early stages of spreading through the population than to eradicate an endemic pathogen, the governing principle has been that no emerging infectious disease should be allowed to become endemic. This goal has been pursued reasonably successfully and without controversy for many decades.

The most famous newly emerging pathogens were the filoviruses (Ebola44-46, Marburg47,48), the SARS and MERS coronaviruses, and paramyxoviruses like Nipah49,50. These gained fame because of their high lethality and potential for human-to-human spread, but they were merely the most notable of many examples.

Pigs in close proximity to humans. Such epidemics were almost always aggressively suppressed. Usually, these were small outbreaks, and because highly pathogenic viruses such as Ebola cause very serious sickness in practically all infected people, finding and isolating the contagious individuals is a manageable task. The largest such epidemic was the 2013-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, when a filovirus spread widely in major urban centers for the first time. Containment required a wartime-level mobilization, but that was nevertheless achieved, even though there were nearly 30,000 infections and more than 11,000 deaths51.

SARS was also contained and eradicated from the human population back in 2003-04, and the same happened every time MERS made the jump from camels to humans, as well as when there were Nipah outbreaks in Asia.

The major counterexample of a successful establishment in the human population of a novel highly pathogenic virus is HIV. HIV is a retrovirus, and as such it integrates into the host genome and is thus nearly impossible to eliminate from the body and to eradicate from the population52 (unless all infected individuals are identified and prevented from infecting others for the rest of their lives). However, HIV is not an example of the containment principle being voluntarily abandoned as the virus had made its zoonotic jump and established itself many decades before its eventual discovery53 and recognition54-56, and long before the molecular tools that could have detected and potentially fully contained it existed.

Still, despite all these containment success stories, the emergence of a new pathogen with pandemic potential was a well understood and frequently discussed threat57-60, although influenza viruses rather than coronaviruses were often seen as the most likely culprit61-65. The eventual appearance of SARS-CoV-2 should therefore not have been a huge surprise, and should have been met with a full mobilization of the technical tools and fundamental public health principles developed over the previous decades.

The ecological context One striking property of many emerging pathogens is how many of them come from bats. While the question of whether bats truly harbor more viruses than other mammals in proportion to their own species diversity (which is the second highest within mammals after rodents) is not fully settled yet66-69, many novel viruses do indeed originate from bats, and the ecological and physiological characteristics of bats are highly relevant for understanding the situation that Homo sapiens finds itself in right now.

Group of bats roosting in a cave. Another startling property of bats and their viruses is how highly pathogenic to humans (and other mammals) many bat viruses are, while bats themselves are not much affected (only rabies is well established to cause serious harm to bats68). Why bats seem to carry so many such pathogens, and how they have adapted so well to coexisting with them, has been a long-standing puzzle and although we do not have a definitive answer, some general trends have become clear.

Bats are the only truly flying mammals and have been so for many millions of years. Flying has resulted in a number of specific adaptations, one of them being the tolerance towards a very high body temperature (often on the order of 42-43ºC). Bats often live in huge colonies, literally touching each other, and, again, have lived in conditions of very high density for millions of years. Such densities are rare among mammals and are certainly not the native condition of humans (human civilization and our large dense cities are a very recent phenomenon on evolutionary time scales). Bats are also quite long-lived for such small mammals70-71 – some fruit bats can live more than 35 years and even small cave dwelling species can live about a decade. These are characteristics that might have on one hand facilitated the evolution of a considerable set of viruses associated with bat populations. In order for a non-latent respiratory virus to maintain itself, a minimal population size is necessary. For example, it is hypothesized that measles requires a minimum population size of 250-300,000 individuals72. And bats have existed in a state of high population densities for a very long time, which might explain the high diversity of viruses that they carry. In addition, the long lifespan of many bat species means that their viruses may have to evolve strategies to overcome adaptive immunity and frequently reinfect previously infected individuals as opposed to the situation in short-lived species in which populations turn over quickly (with immunologically naive individuals replacing the ones that die out).

On the other hand, the selective pressure that these viruses have exerted on bats may have resulted in the evolution of various resistance and/or tolerance mechanisms in bats themselves, which in turn have driven the evolution of counter strategies in their viruses, leading them to be highly virulent for other species. Bats certainly appear to be physiologically more tolerant towards viruses that are otherwise highly virulent to other mammals. Several explanations for this adaptation have been proposed, chief among them a much more powerful innate immunity and a tolerance towards infections that does not lead to the development of the kind of hyperinflammatory reactions observed in humans73-75, the high body temperature of bats in flight, and others.

The notable strength of bat innate immunity is often explained by the constitutively active interferon response that has been reported for some bat species76-78. It is possible that this is not a universal characteristic of all bats79 – only a few species have been studied – but it provides a very attractive mechanism for explaining both how bats prevent the development of severe systemic viral infections in their bodies and how their viruses in turn would have evolved powerful mechanisms to silence the interferon response, making them highly pathogenic for other mammals.

The tolerance towards infection is possibly rooted in the absence of some components of the signaling cascades leading to hyperinflammatory reactions and the dampened activity of others80.

Map of scheduled airline traffic around the world, circa June 2009 Map of scheduled airline traffic around the world. Credit: Jpatokal An obvious ecological parallel can be drawn between bats and humans – just as bats live in dense colonies, so now do modern humans. And we may now be at a critical point in the history of our species, in which our ever-increasing ecological footprint has brought us in close contact with bats in a way that was much rarer in the past. Our population is connected in ways that were previously unimaginable. A novel virus can make the zoonotic jump somewhere in Southeast Asia and a carrier of it can then be on the other side of the globe a mere 24-hours later, having encountered thousands of people in airports and other mass transit systems. As a result, bat pathogens are now being transferred from bat populations to the human population in what might prove to be the second major zoonotic spillover event after the one associated with domestication of livestock and pets a few thousand years ago.

Unfortunately for us, our physiology is not suited to tolerate these new viruses. Bats have adapted to live with them over many millions of years. Humans have not undergone the same kind of adaptation and cannot do so on any timescale that will be of use to those living now, nor to our immediate descendants.

Simply put, humans are not bats, and the continuous existence and improvement of what we now call “civilization” depends on the same basic public health and infectious disease control that saw life expectancy in high-income countries more than double to 85 years. This is a challenge that will only increase in the coming years, because the trends that are accelerating the rate of zoonotic transfer of pathogens are certain to persist.

Given this context, it is as important now to maintain the public health principle that no new dangerous pathogens should be allowed to become endemic and that all novel infectious disease outbreaks must be suppressed as it ever was.

The death of public health and the end of epidemiological comfort It is also in this context that the real gravity of what has happened in the last three years emerges.

After HIV, SARS-CoV-2 is now the second most dangerous infectious disease agent that is 'endemic' to the human population on a global scale. And yet not only was it allowed to become endemic, but mass infection was outright encouraged, including by official public health bodies in numerous countries81-83.

The implications of what has just happened have been missed by most, so let’s spell them out explicitly.

We need to be clear why containment of SARS-CoV-2 was actively sabotaged and eventually abandoned. It has absolutely nothing to do with the “impossibility” of achieving it. In fact, the technical problem of containing even a stealthily spreading virus such as SARS-CoV-2 is fully solved, and that solution was successfully applied in practice for years during the pandemic.

The list of countries that completely snuffed out outbreaks, often multiple times, includes Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Bhutan, Cuba, China, and a few others, with China having successfully contained hundreds of separate outbreaks, before finally giving up in late 2022.

The algorithm for containment is well established – passively break transmission chains through the implementation of nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) such as limiting human contacts, high quality respirator masks, indoor air filtration and ventilation, and others, while aggressively hunting down active remaining transmission chains through traditional contact tracing and isolation methods combined with the powerful new tool of population-scale testing.

Oklahoma’s Strategic National Stockpile. Credit: DVIDS Understanding of airborne transmission and institution of mitigation measures, which have heretofore not been utilized in any country, will facilitate elimination, even with the newer, more transmissible variants. Any country that has the necessary resources (or is provided with them) can achieve full containment within a few months. In fact, currently this would be easier than ever before because of the accumulated widespread multiple recent exposures to the virus in the population suppressing the effective reproduction number (Re). For the last 18 months or so we have been seeing a constant high plateau of cases with undulating waves, but not the major explosions of infections with Re reaching 3-4 that were associated with the original introduction of the virus in 2020 and with the appearance of the first Omicron variants in late 2021.

It would be much easier to use NPIs to drive Re to much below 1 and keep it there until elimination when starting from Re around 1.2-1.3 than when it was over 3, and this moment should be used, before another radically new serotype appears and takes us back to those even more unpleasant situations. This is not a technical problem, but one of political and social will. As long as leadership misunderstands or pretends to misunderstand the link between increased mortality, morbidity and poorer economic performance and the free transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the impetus will be lacking to take the necessary steps to contain this damaging virus.

Political will is in short supply because powerful economic and corporate interests have been pushing policymakers to let the virus spread largely unchecked through the population since the very beginning of the pandemic. The reasons are simple. First, NPIs hurt general economic activity, even if only in the short term, resulting in losses on balance sheets. Second, large-scale containment efforts of the kind we only saw briefly in the first few months of the pandemic require substantial governmental support for all the people who need to pause their economic activity for the duration of effort. Such an effort also requires large-scale financial investment in, for example, contact tracing and mass testing infrastructure and providing high-quality masks. In an era dominated by laissez-faire economic dogma, this level of state investment and organization would have set too many unacceptable precedents, so in many jurisdictions it was fiercely resisted, regardless of the consequences for humanity and the economy.

None of these social and economic predicaments have been resolved. The unofficial alliance between big business and dangerous pathogens that was forged in early 2020 has emerged victorious and greatly strengthened from its battle against public health, and is poised to steamroll whatever meager opposition remains for the remainder of this, and future pandemics.

The long-established principles governing how we respond to new infectious diseases have now completely changed – the precedent has been established that dangerous emerging pathogens will no longer be contained, but instead permitted to ‘ease’ into widespread circulation. The intent to “let it rip” in the future is now being openly communicated84. With this change in policy comes uncertainty about acceptable lethality. Just how bad will an infectious disease have to be to convince any government to mobilize a meaningful global public health response?

We have some clues regarding that issue from what happened during the initial appearance of the Omicron “variant” (which was really a new serotype85,86) of SARS-CoV-2. Despite some experts warning that a vaccine-only approach would be doomed to fail, governments gambled everything on it. They were then faced with the brute fact of viral evolution destroying their strategy when a new serotype emerged against which existing vaccines had little effect in terms of blocking transmission. The reaction was not to bring back NPIs but to give up, seemingly regardless of the consequences.

Critically, those consequences were unknown when the policy of no intervention was adopted within days of the appearance of Omicron. All previous new SARS-CoV-2 variants had been deadlier than the original Wuhan strain, with the eventually globally dominant Delta variant perhaps as much as 4× as deadly87. Omicron turned out to be the exception, but again, that was not known with any certainty when it was allowed to run wild through populations. What would have happened if it had followed the same pattern as Delta?

In the USA, for example, the worst COVID-19 wave was the one in the winter of 2020-21, at the peak of which at least 3,500 people were dying daily (the real number was certainly higher because of undercounting due to lack of testing and improper reporting). The first Omicron BA.1 wave saw the second-highest death tolls, with at least 2,800 dying per day at its peak. Had Omicron been as intrinsically lethal as Delta, we could have easily seen a 4-5× higher peak than January 2021, i.e. as many as 12–15,000 people dying a day. Given that we only had real data on Omicron’s intrinsic lethality after the gigantic wave of infections was unleashed onto the population, we have to conclude that 12–15,000 dead a day is now a threshold that will not force the implementation of serious NPIs for the next problematic COVID-19 serotype.

UK National Covid Memorial Wall. Credit: Dominic Alves Logically, it follows that it is also a threshold that will not result in the implementation of NPIs for any other emerging pathogens either. Because why should SARS-CoV-2 be special?

We can only hope that we will never see the day when such an epidemic hits us but experience tells us such optimism is unfounded. The current level of suffering caused by COVID-19 has been completely normalized even though such a thing was unthinkable back in 2019. Populations are largely unaware of the long-term harms the virus is causing to those infected, of the burden on healthcare, increased disability, mortality and reduced life expectancy. Once a few even deadlier outbreaks have been shrugged off by governments worldwide, the baseline of what is considered “acceptable” will just gradually move up and even more unimaginable losses will eventually enter the “acceptable” category. There can be no doubt, from a public health perspective, we are regressing.

We had a second, even more worrying real-life example of what the future holds with the global spread of the MPX virus (formerly known as “monkeypox” and now called “Mpox”) in 2022. MPX is a close relative to the smallpox VARV virus and is endemic to Central and Western Africa, where its natural hosts are mostly various rodent species, but on occasions it infects humans too, with the rate of zoonotic transfer increasing over recent decades88. It has usually been characterized by fairly high mortality – the CFR (Case Fatality Rate) has been ∼3.6% for the strain that circulates in Nigeria and ∼10% for the one in the Congo region, i.e. much worse than SARS-CoV-2. In 2022, an unexpected global MPX outbreak developed, with tens of thousands of confirmed cases in dozens of countries89,90. Normally, this would be a huge cause for alarm, for several reasons.

First, MPX itself is a very dangerous disease. Second, universal smallpox vaccination ended many decades ago with the success of the eradication program, leaving the population born after that completely unprotected. Third, lethality in orthopoxviruses is, in fact, highly variable – VARV itself had a variola major strain, with as much as ∼30% CFR, and a less deadly variola minor variety with CFR ∼1%, and there was considerable variation within variola major too. It also appears that high pathogenicity often evolves from less pathogenic strains through reductive evolution - the loss of certain genes something that can happen fairly easily, may well have happened repeatedly in the past, and may happen again in the future, a scenario that has been repeatedly warned about for decades91,92. For these reasons, it was unthinkable that anyone would just shrug off a massive MPX outbreak – it is already bad enough as it is, but allowing it to become endemic means it can one day evolve towards something functionally equivalent to smallpox in its impact.

Colorized transmission electron micrograph of Mpox virus particles. Credit: NIAID And yet that is exactly what happened in 2022 – barely any measures were taken to contain the outbreak, and countries simply reclassified MPX out of the “high consequence infectious disease” category93 in order to push the problem away, out of sight and out of mind. By chance, it turned out that this particular outbreak did not spark a global pandemic, and it was also characterized, for poorly understood reasons, by an unusually low CFR, with very few people dying94,95. But again, that is not the information that was available at the start of the outbreak, when in a previous, interventionist age of public health, resources would have been mobilized to stamp it out in its infancy, but, in the age of laissez-faire, were not. MPX is now circulating around the world and represents a future threat of uncontrolled transmission resulting in viral adaptation to highly efficient human-to-human spread combined with much greater disease severity.

This is the previously unthinkable future we will live in from now on in terms of our approach to infectious disease.

What may be controlled instead is information. Another lesson of the pandemic is that if there is no testing and reporting of cases and deaths, a huge amount of real human suffering can be very successfully swept under the rug. Early in 2020, such practices – blatant denial that there was any virus in certain territories, outright faking of COVID-19 statistics, and even resorting to NPIs out of sheer desperation but under false pretense that it is not because of COVID-19 – were the domain of failed states and less developed dictatorships. But in 2023 most of the world has adopted such practices – testing is limited, reporting is infrequent, or even abandoned altogether – and there is no reason to expect this to change. Information control has replaced infection control.

After a while it will not even be possible to assess the impact of what is happening by evaluating excess mortality, which has been the one true measure not susceptible to various data manipulation tricks. As we get increasingly removed from the pre-COVID-19 baselines and the initial pandemic years are subsumed into the baseline for calculating excess mortality, excess deaths will simply disappear by the power of statistical magic. Interestingly, countries such as the UK, which has already incorporated two pandemic years in its five-year average, are still seeing excess deaths, which suggests the virus is an ongoing and growing problem.

It should also be stressed that this radical shift in our approach to emerging infectious diseases is probably only the beginning of wiping out the hard-fought public health gains of the last 150+ years. This should be gravely concerning to any individuals and institutions concerned with workers and citizens rights.

This shift is likely to impact existing eradication and elimination efforts. Will the final pushes be made to complete the various global eradication campaigns listed above? That may necessitate some serious effort involving NPIs and active public health measures, but how much appetite is there for such things after they have been now taken out of the toolkit for SARS-CoV-2?

We can also expect previously forgotten diseases to return where they have successfully been locally eradicated. We have to always remember that the diseases that we now control with universal childhood vaccinations have not been globally eradicated – they have disappeared from our lives because vaccination rates are high enough to maintain society as a whole above the disease elimination threshold, but were vaccination rates to slip, those diseases, such as measles, will return with a vengeance.

The anti-vaccine movement was already a serious problem prior to COVID-19, but it was given a gigantic boost with the ill-advised vaccine-only COVID-19 strategy. Governments and their nominal expert advisers oversold the effectiveness of imperfect first generation COVID-vaccines, and simultaneously minimized the harms of SARS-CoV-2, creating a reality gap which gave anti-vaccine rhetoric space to thrive. This is a huge topic to be explored separately. Here it will suffice to say that while anti-vaxxers were a fringe movement prior to the pandemic, “vaccination” in general is now a toxic idea in the minds of truly significant portions of the population. A logical consequence of that shift has been a significant decrease in vaccination coverage for other diseases as well as for COVID-19.

This is even more likely given the shift in attitudes towards children. Child labour, lack of education and large families were the hallmarks of earlier eras of poor public health, which were characterized by high birth-rates and high infant mortality. Attitudes changed dramatically over the course of the 20th century and wherever health and wealth increased, child mortality fell, and the transition was made to small families. Rarity increased perceived value and children’s wellbeing became a central concern for parents and carers. The arrival of COVID-19 changed that, with some governments, advisers, advocacy groups and parents insisting that children should be exposed freely to a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome virus to ‘train’ their immune systems.

Infection, rather than vaccination, was the preferred route for many in public health in 2020, and still is in 2023, despite all that is known about this virus’s propensity to cause damage to all internal organs, the immune system, and the brain, and the unknowns of postinfectious sequelae. This is especially egregious in infants, whose naive immune status may be one of the reasons they have a relatively high hospitalization rate. Some commentators seek to justify the lack of protection for the elderly and vulnerable on a cost basis. We wonder what rationale can justify a lack of protection for newborns and infants, particularly in a healthcare setting, when experience of other viruses tells us children have better outcomes the later they are exposed to disease? If we are not prepared to protect children against a highly virulent SARS virus, why should we protect against others? We should expect a shift in public health attitudes, since ‘endemicity’ means there is no reason to see SARS-CoV-2 as something unique and exceptional.

We can also expect a general degradation of workplace safety protocols and standards, again reversing many decades of hard-fought gains. During COVID-19, aside from a few privileged groups who worked from home, people were herded back into their workplaces without minimal safety precautions such as providing respirators, and improving ventilation and indoor air quality, when a dangerous airborne pathogen was spreading.

Can we realistically expect existing safety precautions and regulations to survive after that precedent has been set? Can we expect public health bodies and regulatory agencies, whose job it is to enforce these standards, to fight for workplace safety given what they did during the pandemic? It is highly doubtful. After all, they stubbornly refused to admit that SARS-CoV-2 is airborne (even to this very day in fact – the World Health Organization’s infamous “FACT: #COVID19 is NOT airborne” Tweet from March 28 2020 is still up in its original form), and it is not hard to see why – implementing airborne precautions in workplaces, schools, and other public spaces would have resulted in a cost to employers and governments; a cost they could avoid if they simply denied they needed to take such precautions. But short-term thinking has resulted in long-term costs to those same organizations, through the staffing crisis, and the still-rising disability tsunami. The same principle applies to all other existing safety measures.

Worse, we have now entered the phase of abandoning respiratory precautions even in hospitals. The natural consequence of unmasked staff and patients, even those known to be SARS-CoV-2 positive, freely mixing in overcrowded hospitals is the rampant spread of hospital-acquired infections, often among some of the most vulnerable demographics. This was previously thought to be a bad thing. And what of the future? If nobody is taking any measures to stop one particular highly dangerous nosocomial infection, why would anyone care about all the others, which are often no easier to prevent? And if standards of care have slipped to such a low point with respect to COVID-19, why would anyone bother providing the best care possible for other conditions? This is a one-way feed-forward healthcare system degradation that will only continue.

Finally, the very intellectual foundations of the achievements of the last century and a half are eroding. Chief among these is the germ theory of infectious disease, by which transmission chains can be isolated and broken. The alternative theory, of spontaneous generation of pathogens, means there are no chains to be broken. Today, we are told that it is impossible to contain SARS-CoV-2 and we have to "just live with it,” as if germ theory no longer holds. The argument that the spread of SARS-CoV-2 to wildlife means that containment is impossible illustrates these contradictions further – SARS-CoV-2 came from wildlife, as did all other zoonotic infections, so how does the virus spilling back to wildlife change anything in terms of public health protocol? But if one has decided that from here on there will be no effort to break transmission chains because it is too costly for the privileged few in society, then excuses for that laissez-faire attitude will always be found.

And that does not bode well for the near- and medium-term future of the human species on planet Earth.

(Follow the link for more than 100 references and sources)

[lensman-arms-race]

Which Skibidi Toilet characters should you eat?

Delicious, a delicacy:

Regular Skibidi Toilets: steam them in their shells, and extract the roe from the cistern for an excellent tangy spread. The organs also make great sausages.

Regular Camera units: If you boil the head until the casing is soft, you can crack it open and eat the camera within. The lenses will acquire a jelly-like consistency and can be used like aspic. Don't forget to harvest the transmission fluids and coolants from the main body - you can boil this down to a sticky reduction that tastes not unlike barbecue sauce. The best-kept secret? Boil down their coats; they reduce to a membrane that you can use for sausage casings. If you bag a Camera unit carrying a Baba Booey button, look for the detonators nearby - the explosives make a lovely hot peppery sauce.

Decent snacks:

Regular and large Speaker units: Their bodies are full of nicely chewy wires. Inside the head you can find the speaker-cone. Pull that out and stuff it with wires, then you can fold them over into something like pierogi. Large speakers obviously give you more bang for your buck; their heads contain multiple cones.

Large Camera units: Their heads and bodies are mostly tough and gamey; an acquired taste. However, you can harvest the film inside the reels on their head and use it like tagliatelle pasta, or like seaweed. Grind up the microphone for a nutmeg-like spice.

Edible if you're desperate:

Regular TV units: You must remove or drain the teleport circuit before cooking, otherwise it will explode from the heat. Removing it is preferred; if you can harvest the black fog within, you can use it to make a sauce that tastes not unlike hoisin. Thoroughly boil the head to remove the hazardous sharpness from the glass; it should acquire a soft, slightly sticky crunch a bit like sugar candy. Makes an intriguing alternative to seaweed wrap for sushi rolls (try making them with Skibidi roe).

Partially edible:

Acid tank Skibidi Toilets: Remove the tanks entirely. Don't let any of the contents get onto the meat; it's like trying to make meringue with egg whites contaminated by yolk. Just doesn't work.

Astro Toilets: Same as Skibidi Toilets but it's so much more effort to break into their shells.

Technically edible:

Secret Agent: As with any human, the tastiest part is the 'web' of flesh between the thumb and forefinger. It's not worth it, though - eating the Secret Agent is not recommended. His meat is oddly grey-green and oily for a human, and he'll re-appear a week later while you are tormented with memories that shouldn't be in your head.

Skibidi Kitty: Cat meat is unpleasant tasting. Plus, how could you?

Probably toxic:

Skibidi parasites: the meat of the 'tongue' appendage causes hallucinations if ingested, with variable side effects. The parasite is safe to eat with the tongue removed, but is tough as old boots.