Ahead of the film's release next month, Demi Lovato released her track off the soundtrack for Disney's "Frozen" on Monday (October 21).
Excited about sharing her music with fans, the "Heart Attack" singer tweeted, "Here it is!!!! Listen to my version of #LetItGo from Disney's Frozen!!!"
On Monday, November 25th, the full soundtrack from the animated film will be released, two days ahead of the movie.
In the frosty flick, Elsa, the Snow Queen (voiced by Idina Menzel) sings the song about breaking free from your insecurities. Check it out in the player below.
FILE - In this April 30, 2013 file photo, Michael Skakel leaves the courtroom after the conclusion of trial regarding his legal representation at State Superior Court in Vernon, Conn. A Connecticut judge on Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2013, granted a new trial for Skakel, ruling his attorney failed to adequately represent him when he was convicted in 2002 of killing his neighbor in 1975. (AP Photo/The Greenwich Time, Jason Rearick, Pool, File)
FILE - In this April 30, 2013 file photo, Michael Skakel leaves the courtroom after the conclusion of trial regarding his legal representation at State Superior Court in Vernon, Conn. A Connecticut judge on Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2013, granted a new trial for Skakel, ruling his attorney failed to adequately represent him when he was convicted in 2002 of killing his neighbor in 1975. (AP Photo/The Greenwich Time, Jason Rearick, Pool, File)
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — With a new trial ordered for Michael Skakel, a defense lawyer for the Kennedy cousin serving time in the 1975 slaying of a neighbor said he will seek his release from prison on bond.
Skakel's conviction was set aside Wednesday by a Connecticut judge, Thomas Bishop, who ruled that Skakel's trial attorney failed to adequately represent him when he was found guilty in 2002. Bridgeport State's Attorney John Smriga said prosecutors will appeal the decision.
Skakel's current attorney, Hubert Santos, said he expects to file a motion for bail on Thursday. If a judge approves it, Skakel could then post bond and be released from prison.
"We're very, very thrilled," Santos said. "I always felt that Michael was innocent."
Skakel argued his trial attorney, Michael Sherman, was negligent in defending him when he was convicted in the golf club bludgeoning of Martha Moxley when they were 15 in wealthy Greenwich.
Prosecutors contended Sherman's efforts far exceeded standards and that the verdict was based on compelling evidence against Skakel.
John Moxley, the victim's brother, said the ruling took him and his family by surprise and they hope the state wins an appeal.
"Having been in the courtroom during the trial, there were a lot of things that Mickey Sherman did very cleverly," Moxley said about Skakel's trial lawyer. "But the evidence was against him. And when the evidence is against you, there's almost nothing you can do."
In his ruling, the judge wrote that defense in such a case requires attention to detail, an energetic investigation and a coherent plan of defense.
"Trial counsel's failures in each of these areas of representation were significant and, ultimately, fatal to a constitutionally adequate defense," Thomas wrote. "As a consequence of trial counsel's failures as stated, the state procured a judgment of conviction that lacks reliability."
Among other issues, the judge wrote that the defense could have focused more on Skakel's brother, Thomas, who was an early suspect in the case because he was the last person seen with Moxley. Had Sherman done so, "there is a reasonable probability that the outcome of the trial would have been different," the judge wrote.
During a state trial in April on the appeal, Skakel took the stand and blasted Sherman's handling of the case, portraying him as an overly confident lawyer having fun and basking in the limelight while making fundamental mistakes from poor jury picks to failing to track down key witnesses.
Sherman has said he did all he could to prevent Skakel's conviction and denied he was distracted by media attention in the high-profile case.
Prosecutors said Sherman spent thousands of hours preparing the defense, challenged the state on large and small legal issues, consulted experts and was assisted by some of the state's top lawyers. Sherman attacked the state's evidence, presented an alibi and pointed the finger at an earlier suspect, prosecutors said.
"This strategy failed not because of any fault of Sherman's, but because of the strength of the state's case," prosecutor Susann Gill wrote in court papers.
Skakel, who maintains his innocence, was denied parole last year and was told he would not be eligible again to be considered for release for five years.
Microsoft said it improved Kinect on the Xbox One, and now a leaked setup manual indicates how little space it requires to operate. The PDF NeoGAF spotted notes that a minimum 1.4 meters (just over 4.5-feet) between the user and Microsoft's new do-all sensor is all that's required. For those of us with cozy living quarters, this could be a bit more generous than the last one's recommended six to eight-foot gap. We've reached out to Microsoft for an official comment and will update this post if we hear back. Until then however, we're hoping that November 22nd will mark the end of us rearranging our living room to play the latest Dance Central.
Arcade Fire on Saturday night in Bushwick. Win Butler on the left, Richard Reed Parry on the right.
Courtesy of Sachyn Mital
Arcade Fire on Saturday night in Bushwick. Win Butler on the left, Richard Reed Parry on the right.
Courtesy of Sachyn Mital
Saturday's hottest ticket in New York City was to see a band nobody's heard of. The Reflektors burned through a fan-only presale, and tickets hit the secondary market at prices high as $5,000 — a hefty sum to see any band, much less a band yet to release its first album, in Bushwick's warehousiest corridors. That's like half a year's rent for that neighborhood. But the hype was real. Based only on the "Is-this-really-happening?" disbelief stretching the faces of all the superfans and industry types in the audience, you'd think they were about to see a band that would never play a skuzzy converted depot in east Brooklyn: U2 or Bruce Springsteen, or, I don't know, Arcade Fire.
The thing about the musicians on stage was that they looked a lot like Arcade Fire. Despite his Jack White-like red shirt and white tie, the bassist's flaming red hair drew Richard Reed Parry comparisons. And they sounded like Arcade Fire, too. They even covered "Sprawl II." And that's because — (no) surprise! — The Reflektors was Arcade Fire. That cat was never really in the bag. After a little tongue-in-cheek stage banter ("We started three years ago. We were nervous to play New York because we heard you're standoffish!"), a gold-suited Win Butler and his band ran through a set of mostly unheard tracks from their upcoming album Reflektor, masquerading as a brand new band riding the promotional cycle for its first album.
But the group that played at 299 Meserole this weekend, no matter what you called them, was clearly neither a set of wide-eyed naïfs dropping their first 12", nor the band that made sneaking out of your parents house feel like toppling the Berlin Wall. The musicians were belied by more than their popularity; never mind that most in attendance — who embraced the show's "formal" dress code with thrifted tuxes, reflective masks or fratty banana suits — only got access to buying these tickets after pre-ordering Reflektor. They're also darker, and maybe a more disillusioned, too. "We're so excited to play CMJ," Butler called out sarcastically. "Thank you so much to all the industry types who offered to sign our band!"
But the plucky effrontery that has underpinned all Arcade Fire's work to date is crumbling. The band has told stories about struggling under somebody's thumb since its 2003 debut album Funeral. Songs like "Wake Up" and "Crown of Love" captured an anthemic emotional power, half hope and half rebellion, unmatched by the group's successors and copycats. The songs bloomed around refrains that felt bigger than any stadium they eventually filled. But this is less so on Reflektor. The new songs Arcade Fire played Saturday were full of new (mostly rhythmic) ideas coming to the fore and many old (mostly romantic) identifiers fading away.
Some saw that change coming when Arcade Fire announced that James Murphy, the David Bowie-obsessed former face of LCD Soundsystem and head of disco-punk label DFA, was announced as Reflektor's producer. He introduced the band at the show. Others heard it in the album's dynamic, Bowie-featuring first single, which abandoned that operatic Springsteenian populism for pop reflective of the transformations undertaken by their arena-sized predecessors the Talking Heads and U2 (there's that similarity again).
That change got its first full public display in Bushwick. Take "We Exist," for one. Four years ago an Arcade Fire song with titles that way might've sounded like "Born to Run," but when that "Hang On To Your Love"/"Your Cover's Blown" bassline crept out beneath the venue's Murphy-esque disco balls and reflective hanging polygons, it left no ambiguities about the type of music Arcade Fire is now interested in making. Fans of the group should have been safe assuming they'd get the standard fare of marching violinists yowling to the rafters, but instead were blindsided by Sade. With strings marginalized and two miscellaneous percussionists in tow, this group looked and sounded more like Stop Making Sense than In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.
This departure is not a totally clean break from their last work, 2010's Grammy-winning, Twitter-enragingThe Suburbs. There were of course the type of joyful moments Arcade Fire is known for (see the swelling "Supersymmetry"), and brand new sounds, like the Princely backup vocals of "It's Never Over (Orpheus)" and the murky rave-up "Here Comes the Night Time." But taking the stage in the throes of a transformation didn't always work in Arcade Fire's favor. The band sometimes sounded uninspired performing new songs they'd written in their old style (like the underwhelming "Joan of Arc") or those that didn't do Butler's heady aspiration to sound like "a mash up of Studio 54 and Hatian voodoo" real justice (the chopped reggaeton of "Flashbulb Eyes"). Some old favorites even looked limp in their new duds (like the beloved "Neighborhood #3 (Power Out)"), while others ("Haiti") sound suddenly prophetic of where the band has touched down.
Gone is the jubilation of the Arcade Fire of days past. The crowd occasionally felt awkward inside the band's new big beat, and responded to Butler's post-encore announcement that there would be no more Reflektors, or Arcade Fire, tonight but rather a DJ set from James Murphy for those who wanted to "dance all night," with more than a smattering of boos. But the band itself is dancing toward something that'll lead it outside the sounds their old crowd formed around. Seeing that live was alone worth the price of admission.
In this Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2013 photo, Matthew Cordle enters court for his arraignment on a charge of aggravated vehicular homicide in Columbus, Ohio. Attorneys are seeking a reduced sentence for Cordle, who confessed in an online video to causing a fatal wrong-way crash after a night of drinking. (AP Photo/Mike Munden)
In this Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2013 photo, Matthew Cordle enters court for his arraignment on a charge of aggravated vehicular homicide in Columbus, Ohio. Attorneys are seeking a reduced sentence for Cordle, who confessed in an online video to causing a fatal wrong-way crash after a night of drinking. (AP Photo/Mike Munden)
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — An Ohio man was sentenced Wednesday to 6½ years in prison for causing a fatal wrong-way crash after a night of heavy drinking, which he had confessed to in an online video.
Matthew Cordle, 22, had faced up to 8½ years in prison. "Whatever my sentence may be, there's no fair sentence when it comes to the loss of a life," Cordle told the judge before the sentence was handed down.
Franklin County Judge David Fais sentenced Cordle to six years for aggravated vehicular homicide and six months for driving under the influence of alcohol. He also revoked his driving privileges for life.
Cordle apologized to the family of his victim, Vincent Canzani, who was killed in the June crash. "It should have been me that night, the guilty party, instead of an innocent man," he said.
His guilty plea last month came just a week after he was indicted in a speedy process absent of the numerous court filings that usually cause such cases to drag on for weeks or months.
Canzani's daughter asked Fais for the maximum sentence. "My father got a death sentence and did nothing wrong," Angela Canzani told the judge.
Vincent Canzani was a talented artist and photographer who enjoyed working out and spending time with friends and family, she said. She said her children and her sister's children will never get to see their grandfather again.
The judge also read a letter from Vincent Canzani's ex-wife who said she believed Vincent Canzani would not have wanted a maximum sentence. She said she believes Cordle will keep his promise never to drink and drive again.
Cordle's father, Dave Cordle, told the judge he was "disappointed, disgusted and heartbroken" at the choices his son made that night. He did not ask for leniency, and told Canzani's family his heart was filled with sorrow at their loss and hopes someday they can forgive his son.
In a 3½-minute video posted in early September, Cordle admitted he killed a man and said he "made a mistake" when he decided to drive that night. "My name is Matthew Cordle, and on June 22, 2013, I hit and killed Vincent Canzani," he says somberly. "This video will act as my confession."
Cordle acknowledged having a drinking problem after the crash and entered a treatment program as prosecutors gathered evidence against him. He told his attorneys early on that he wanted to plead guilty but made the video against their advice.
Prosecutors say a heavily intoxicated Cordle denied causing an accident or killing anyone when he was first taken to a hospital after the crash, in which he suffered broken ribs and a fractured skull. His attorneys say he may have suffered a brain injury.
Cordle, who lives in Powell, a Columbus suburb, told Fais last month that he had no recollection of the crash, how much he'd had to drink that night or whether he'd had anything to eat.
"I drank so much I was blacked out," Cordle said at the Sept. 18 hearing where he pleaded guilty.
Prosecutor Ron O'Brien said he believed Cordle's remorse in the video was genuine, but he said any further interviews would be self-serving. He also disputed Cordle's assertion in the confessional video that he could have fought the case against him, which O'Brien called "a slam dunk."
O'Brien sought the maximum sentence of 8½ years. Cordle's attorneys asked for a sentence that was fair.
The video posted on YouTube has been viewed more than 2.3 million times. It begins with Cordle's face blurred as he describes how he has struggled with depression and was simply trying to have a good time with friends going "from bar to bar" the night of the accident. He then describes how he ended up driving into oncoming traffic on Interstate 670. Cordle's face becomes clear as he reveals his name and confesses to killing Canzani.
He ends the video by pleading with viewers not to drink and drive.
___
Online:
Matthew Cordle's video confession: http://bit.ly/1dWug8i
HIV-positive babies rest in an orphanage in Nairobi, Kenya. Treatment right after birth may make it possible for HIV-positive newborns to fight off the virus.
Brent Stirton/Getty Images
HIV-positive babies rest in an orphanage in Nairobi, Kenya. Treatment right after birth may make it possible for HIV-positive newborns to fight off the virus.
Brent Stirton/Getty Images
A 3-year-old girl born in Mississippi with HIV acquired from her mother during pregnancy remains free of detectable virus at least 18 months after she stopped taking antiviral pills.
New results on this child, published online by the New England Journal of Medicine, appear to green-light a study in the advanced planning stages in which researchers around the world will try to replicate her successful treatment in other infected newborns.
And it means that the Mississippi girl still can be considered possibly or even probably cured of HIV infection — only the second person in the world with that lucky distinction. The first is Timothy Ray Brown, a 47-year-old American man apparently cured by a bone marrow transplant he received in Berlin a half-dozen years ago.
This new report addresses many of the questions raised earlier this year when disclosure of the Mississippi child's case was called a possible game-changer in the long search for an HIV cure.
"There was some very healthy skepticism," Dr. Katherine Luzuriaga, a professor at the University of Massachusetts in Worcester, tells Shots. She's part of the team that has been exhaustively testing the toddler's blood and considering every possible explanation for her apparently HIV-free state.
Luzuriaga is confident the latest tests prove that the child was truly infected with HIV at the time of her birth — not merely carrying remnants of free-floating virus or infected blood cells transferred before birth from her mother, as some skeptics wondered.
The UMass researcher says there's no way the child's mother could have contributed enough of her own blood plasma to the newborn to account for the high levels of HIV detected in the child's blood shortly after birth.
Similarly, Luzuriaga says, new calculations show that the mother "would have had to transfer a huge number of [HIV-infected] white blood cells to the baby in order for us to get the [viral] signal that we got early on."
Clinching the question as far as the researchers are concerned is the infant's response to anti-HIV drugs that she began receiving shortly after birth. The remarkable earliness of her treatment is a crucial feature that makes this child different from almost any other.
"There's a very characteristic clearance curve of viruses once we start babies on treatment," Luzuriaga says. "The decay of viruses we see in this baby is exactly what we saw in early treatment trials from 20 years ago when we initiated anti-retroviral therapy and shut off viral replication. That's a very different decay curve than you would expect if it were just free virus transferred to the baby."
It might be helpful to recap the unusual, if not unique, features of the Mississippi case.
Her mother did not receive prenatal care, so she was not identified as HIV-infected before delivery. If she had been, she would have received drugs that are highly effective in preventing mother-to-child transmission of the virus.
While the mother was in labor, she got HIV testing, as is routine for women without prenatal care. When that came up positive, Dr. Hannah Gay, a pediatrician at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, was ready to test the newborn for infection and start anti-retroviral medicines within 30 hours of birth.
The treatment quickly cleared the virus from the baby's blood. Normally such children would stay on antiviral drugs for a lifetime. But in this case the mother – whose life circumstances were reportedly chaotic – stopped giving the child the medication between 15 and 18 months after birth.
Gay and her colleagues caught up to the child when she was 23 months old and were astonished to discover she was apparently still virus-free despite being off treatment. Five rounds of state-of-the-art testing — at UMass, Johns Hopkins, federal research labs and the University of California San Diego — failed to reveal any trace of the virus in her blood.
That led to last spring's report and widely reported hope that the child had been cured of HIV.
But Dr. Scott Hammer, an HIV researcher at Columbia University in New York, is not quite convinced. "Is the child cured of HIV infection? The best answer at this moment is a definitive 'maybe,' " Hammer writes in a New England Journaleditorial that accompanied the report.
The reason is that a couple of tests done when the child was about 2 years old found indications that her system may contain pieces of RNA or DNA from HIV. This hints that some of the nucleic acid building blocks of the virus are hanging around within her blood cells.
There's no evidence these "proviral" remnants are capable of assembling themselves into whole viruses that can make copies of themselves. But researchers are concerned about that possibility and how it might be headed off.
"The question is whether those viral nucleic acids have the ability at some point to replicate and allow a rebound of the virus," Luzuriaga acknowledges. "That's why it's important to continue to test the baby over time." She says that means years.
But for now, the signs from the Mississippi child's case are encouraging enough to have generated an ambitious global human experiment that Luzuriaga says is in final planning stages.
Women who present in labor without having had prenatal care will be tested for HIV and, if positive, their infants will be intensively treated within a couple of days of birth, as the Mississippi child was. Then they'll be followed with the most sensitive tests to determine if the virus has been eradicated.
If certain criteria are met, researchers plan to decide whether it would be safe to discontinue HIV treatment deliberately and follow the children closely to see if the virus returns. (If it did, treatment would be restarted.)
If the experiment succeeds, it would be a huge advance in the prevention of childhood HIV and AIDS in many parts of the world. More than 9 out of 10 of the world's 3.4 million HIV-infected children live in sub-Saharan Africa, where many women deliver without having had prenatal care or HIV treatment. Around 900 children are newly infected every day.
Meanwhile, researchers pursuing an HIV cure will convene next month in San Francisco to consider various strategies — for adults as well as children. One other recent glimmer of hope was provided this summer by Boston researchers who reported that two HIV-infected men with lymphoma remain virus-free without treatment for several months after stopping antiviral treatment.
Study of decline of malaria in the US could affect approach to malaria epidemic abroad, UT Arlington researcher says
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
21-Oct-2013
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Contact: Bridget Lewis blewis@uta.edu 817-272-3317 University of Texas at Arlington
Rethinking the 1930s attack on malaria
A new University of Texas at Arlington study about the elimination of malaria in the 1930s American South may have significant implications for solving modern day malaria outbreaks in parts of Africa, Central and Latin America, and Asia.
Researchers challenged a leading argument that movement of Southern tenant farmers away from mosquito breeding grounds was the dominant factor in the decline of malaria in U.S. during the 1930s.
Instead, targeted public health interventions and the development of local-level public health infrastructure helped eradicate the disease, according to Daniel Sledge, assistant professor of political science at UT Arlington and lead author of Eliminating Malaria in the American South: An Analysis of the Decline of Malaria in 1930s Alabama, a paper recently published by the American Journal of Public Health.
We found that targeted public health interventions, supported by the federally backed development of state and local public health infrastructure, led to the decline of malaria despite widespread and deep-seated poverty, Sledge said.
Beth Wright, dean of the College of Liberal Arts at UT Arlington, said Sledges research benefits the public, health professionals and policy makers globally.
Dr. Sledges work has far-reaching implications for those who work to eradicate malaria and similar diseases, Wright said. Huge challenges remain, but such research brings about better understanding of potential solutions and could ultimately help save lives.
Malaria is an infectious disease caused by a parasite called plasmodium and transmitted through the bites of infected mosquitoes. The disease causes fever, headache, and vomiting. Untreated, it can become life threatening.
Malaria killed an estimated 1.24 million worldwide in 2010 and decimated economies in the heavily populated, warm climate regions of the Global South, according to recent studies.
Malaria played a similarly devastating role in the American South until the 1930s, researchers detailed, by lowering the productivity of workers, deterring migration into the region and severely limiting economic growth.
Historian Margaret Humphreys argued in her landmark 2001 book, Malaria: Race, Poverty, and Public Health in the United States, that it was the removal of the malaria carrier and victim from the vicinity of the anopheles mosquito that likely had the largest effect on the decline of the disease.
But Sledge and co-author George Mohler, assistant professor of mathematics and computer science at Santa Clara University in California, found otherwise.
We assessed this argument using Census data on the number of farms operated by tenants during the 1930s. We found that highly malarial areas actually gained population during the period that malaria declined, Sledge said. Changes in the type of farms, meanwhile, didnt lead to a decline in malaria.
He added: Put another way, population movement didnt lead to the end of malaria in the United States public health work did.
During the 1930s, the federal Works Progress Administration put unemployed Southerners to work draining millions of acres of wetlands. Along with the federally sponsored creation of local health departments, these drainage projects led to the decline of malaria, the authors said.
The federal government further ramped up its efforts during World War II, creating the agency that became the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention specifically to fight southern malaria. After the war, the CDC used the insecticide DDT to eradicate the few remaining pockets of the disease.
For their study, Sledge and Mohler used a mathematical model to analyze the decline of malaria in each of the 67 counties in Alabama, an archetypical Deep South cotton state that experienced high levels of malaria incidence well into the 1930s.
In the model, we categorized counties into three risk levels and then estimated the dependence of mortality rates on variables related to weather, WPA projects, and population movement, Mohler said. After drought, the most important variable for predicting a decline in mortality rates was the amount of drainage in a county, rather than movement out of high risk counties or a reduction in tenant farms.
In addition to drainage work, researchers point to the importance of measures such as screening and public health infrastructure as well as the training of public health workers in the elimination of the disease.
While the team concedes that there are considerable distinctions between the current Global South and the American South of the 1930s, they argue that malaria can be controlled in the face of poverty and economic dislocation and without major social change.
Today, disease surveillance, drainage measures and screening work to ensure that, on those occasions when malaria is reintroduced from outside of the U.S., the chain of transmission does not begin again, Sledge said.
###
Sledges work is representative of the world-class research under way at The University of Texas at Arlington, a comprehensive research institution of more than 33,000 students and more than 2,200 faculty members in the heart of North Texas. Visit www.uta.edu to learn more.
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Study of decline of malaria in the US could affect approach to malaria epidemic abroad, UT Arlington researcher says
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
21-Oct-2013
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Contact: Bridget Lewis blewis@uta.edu 817-272-3317 University of Texas at Arlington
Rethinking the 1930s attack on malaria
A new University of Texas at Arlington study about the elimination of malaria in the 1930s American South may have significant implications for solving modern day malaria outbreaks in parts of Africa, Central and Latin America, and Asia.
Researchers challenged a leading argument that movement of Southern tenant farmers away from mosquito breeding grounds was the dominant factor in the decline of malaria in U.S. during the 1930s.
Instead, targeted public health interventions and the development of local-level public health infrastructure helped eradicate the disease, according to Daniel Sledge, assistant professor of political science at UT Arlington and lead author of Eliminating Malaria in the American South: An Analysis of the Decline of Malaria in 1930s Alabama, a paper recently published by the American Journal of Public Health.
We found that targeted public health interventions, supported by the federally backed development of state and local public health infrastructure, led to the decline of malaria despite widespread and deep-seated poverty, Sledge said.
Beth Wright, dean of the College of Liberal Arts at UT Arlington, said Sledges research benefits the public, health professionals and policy makers globally.
Dr. Sledges work has far-reaching implications for those who work to eradicate malaria and similar diseases, Wright said. Huge challenges remain, but such research brings about better understanding of potential solutions and could ultimately help save lives.
Malaria is an infectious disease caused by a parasite called plasmodium and transmitted through the bites of infected mosquitoes. The disease causes fever, headache, and vomiting. Untreated, it can become life threatening.
Malaria killed an estimated 1.24 million worldwide in 2010 and decimated economies in the heavily populated, warm climate regions of the Global South, according to recent studies.
Malaria played a similarly devastating role in the American South until the 1930s, researchers detailed, by lowering the productivity of workers, deterring migration into the region and severely limiting economic growth.
Historian Margaret Humphreys argued in her landmark 2001 book, Malaria: Race, Poverty, and Public Health in the United States, that it was the removal of the malaria carrier and victim from the vicinity of the anopheles mosquito that likely had the largest effect on the decline of the disease.
But Sledge and co-author George Mohler, assistant professor of mathematics and computer science at Santa Clara University in California, found otherwise.
We assessed this argument using Census data on the number of farms operated by tenants during the 1930s. We found that highly malarial areas actually gained population during the period that malaria declined, Sledge said. Changes in the type of farms, meanwhile, didnt lead to a decline in malaria.
He added: Put another way, population movement didnt lead to the end of malaria in the United States public health work did.
During the 1930s, the federal Works Progress Administration put unemployed Southerners to work draining millions of acres of wetlands. Along with the federally sponsored creation of local health departments, these drainage projects led to the decline of malaria, the authors said.
The federal government further ramped up its efforts during World War II, creating the agency that became the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention specifically to fight southern malaria. After the war, the CDC used the insecticide DDT to eradicate the few remaining pockets of the disease.
For their study, Sledge and Mohler used a mathematical model to analyze the decline of malaria in each of the 67 counties in Alabama, an archetypical Deep South cotton state that experienced high levels of malaria incidence well into the 1930s.
In the model, we categorized counties into three risk levels and then estimated the dependence of mortality rates on variables related to weather, WPA projects, and population movement, Mohler said. After drought, the most important variable for predicting a decline in mortality rates was the amount of drainage in a county, rather than movement out of high risk counties or a reduction in tenant farms.
In addition to drainage work, researchers point to the importance of measures such as screening and public health infrastructure as well as the training of public health workers in the elimination of the disease.
While the team concedes that there are considerable distinctions between the current Global South and the American South of the 1930s, they argue that malaria can be controlled in the face of poverty and economic dislocation and without major social change.
Today, disease surveillance, drainage measures and screening work to ensure that, on those occasions when malaria is reintroduced from outside of the U.S., the chain of transmission does not begin again, Sledge said.
###
Sledges work is representative of the world-class research under way at The University of Texas at Arlington, a comprehensive research institution of more than 33,000 students and more than 2,200 faculty members in the heart of North Texas. Visit www.uta.edu to learn more.
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Share
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
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