After eight years in which the Bush administration trashed science to favor a political agenda, these blogger are saying that Kennedy would be a most injudicious choice, since he’s just as liable to politicize science as the other guys did, only from the left.

The crassest example was Kennedy’s error- and slander-filled “investigative” article in Rolling Stone magazine, in which he voiced the discredited claim that the Centers for Disease Control and drug companies had conspired to poison American children with the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal in vaccines.

During the campaign, anti-vaccine advocates asked Obama and Sen. John McCain to comment on whether they thought parents should have the right to skip vaccines they feared. McCain hemmed and hawed, while Obama said he thought children should get all the recommended vaccines. Obama apparently was influenced on this by his senior adviser Michael Strautmanis, who reportedly has an autistic child. Sources in the autistic parents’ community say that Strautmanis set Obama straight about the lack of any link between vaccines and autism.

If this is true, Kennedy would be a surprising choice.

Correction: The original version of this post should have listed Obama adviser Michael Strautmanis as having an autistic child, not David Axelrod. We regret the error.

Wikimedia Commons

Subprime mortgages have ruined banks and insurance companies and brought the global economy to its knees. Now it looks like they’re also causing the spread of deadly West Nile disease.

In a weird new wrinkle in the story of the exploding mortgage crisis, the housing market in Bakersfield, Calif., was tied to a 276 percent increase in the number of West Nile virus cases, according to the November issue of the scientific journal, Emerging Infectious Diseases.

It’s easy to find correlations between seemingly unrelated events; epidemiological journals are full of stuff like this which doesn’t mean a thing. For example, as ice cream consumption increases, so do drownings. But it’s not because ice cream causes drowning.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

In this case, though, the cause-and-effect link is pretty clear. Delinquent mortgages in Bakersfield and the surrounding community caused people to abandon their houses, and mosquitoes carrying West Nile virus bred in their untended swimming pools. The resulting outbreak is a epidemiologists’ textbook case of the unintended consequences of economic turmoil. It’s not the first such example, and undoubtedly won’t be the last before the crisis ends.

“We’ve had problems with West Nile in California since 2004, but in 2007 the housing market really went south and it resulted in a lot of neglected swimming pools,” said lead author William K. Reisen, an entomologist at the University of California, Davis. “They’ve always had problems with homeowner neglect of pools. But all of a sudden, it went through the roof.”

There were 140 confirmed human cases of West Nile virus in the Bakersfield area in 2007, the largest outbreak in California, and the worst mosquito-born encephalitis virus outbreak in Kern County since 1952. At least two patients — one, a 96-year-old woman — died of the disease, which can also cause brain damage.

The outbreak spread to several other counties and led Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to hold a news conference and release $6.2 million in emergency mosquito abatement funds.

West Nile virus outbreaks intensified in other parts of California this summer, in particular in Los Angeles. This could well be related to the swelling foreclosures in that area, Reisen said.

Insect-borne microorganisms thrive in times of economic crisis and dislocation. For example, mosquito-borne dengue fever has surged in the growing cities of Asia and Latin America in the past decade; as people move into urban areas that lack running water, they store water in tanks that are perfect breeding grounds for mosquitoes like Aedes aegypti, the leading dengue vector.

Bakersfield, CA (Flickr: Alice Chaos)

Count the Kern County West Nile outbreak in that category. “What’s worrisome is that most U.S. mosquito abatement districts are funded by property taxes,” said Reisen. “As their revenue falls, it’s going to be harder to keep up with the abandoned swimming pools.”

West Nile has spread gradually across the United States since the first cases were reported in 1999 in New York City. It’s carried by several different species of mosquitoes and can infect many birds and mammals — from crows and chickens to cats and horses. In different areas of the country, the epidemic has generally slowed after the virus kills off a large enough number of the birds that carry it from place to place. Only about one in 100 people exposed to the virus become ill; about three percent of those it sickens die from this disease.

No one in Kern County had anticipated the 2007 outbreak. Winter and spring rains were light, and the Kern River, which flows through Bakersfield and sometimes leaves pools of water where mosquitoes can breed, was dry. In fact, water was so short that it changed the bird ecology of the region, resulting in an expansion of house sparrow flocks. Unlike other bird populations in the area, most of the sparrows lacked protective immunity to West Nile virus.

The county Mosquito and Vector Control District conducted an aerial survey of the town that showed an extensive number of green or neglected pools, “most of which were producing mosquitoes,” according to the article in Emerging Infectious Diseases.

“The likely reasons for neglected pools,” reported the journal, which is published by the Centers for Disease Control, “are the adjustable rate mortgage and associated housing crises in Kern County and throughout California, which have led to increased house sales and abandonments.” Kern County suffered a 300 percent increase in delinquencies in the spring quarter of 2007 compared with the same period in 2006.

As chlorine-based chemicals deteriorated in the abandoned pools, “invasive algal blooms created green swimming pools that were exploited rapidly by urban mosquitoes, thereby establishing a myriad of larval habitats within suburban neighborhoods.”

By California law, properties with swimming pools must be surrounded by six-foot-high fences, and so it has been difficult for mosquito control agents to enter foreclosed properties. “They can’t just go breaking the doors down,” said Reisen. “It’s kind of a mystery how to get access to these properties.”

The major carrier of West Nile during the 2007 outbreak was the common mosquito Culex pipiens. But by this year, Culex tarsalis, a more efficient West Nile carrier that typically colonizes rural areas, had moved into some of them.

That said, no human cases had been reported in 2008 as of Oct. 23, though the disease continued to infect mosquitoes and kill birds and horses. Kern County officials have been vigilant in spraying the abandoned pools or stocking them with larva-eating fish.

Then too, West Nile outbreaks are sporadic, and seem to depend on complex factors in the virus’ hosts. High temperatures, raising the viral load of mosquitoes, are one such factor; a die-off of the crow population, causing the virus to run out of hosts, can also play a role.

The Bakersfield story presents another such factor: the crashing of American dreams.

The wolf is an intelligent, handsome creature and, for many visitors to Alaska, an integral part of the state’s wild appeal. Wolves live in complex social structures, mate for life and don’t attack humans — it’s easy to see in them the family resemblance to mankind’s best friend.

That’s what makes it so painful to look at the video of an aerial wolfhunt in Alaska that has been circulating since Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was nominated as Sen. John McCain’s running mate on the Republican ticket.

In a program begun by ex-Gov. Frank Murkowski, and intensified by Palin, Alaska has sponsored the aerial hunting of more than 800 wolves since 2002 — out of a state population of perhaps 9,000. Pilots chase the wolves through the deep snow, sometimes for miles, until the exhausted animals have slowed enough to be blown away with shotguns. Then the plane lands and finishes the job, unless the wounded wolf has managed to crawl into the deep woods to bleed to death in solitude.

Palin, who won office with the support of powerful hunting groups, has intensified the “cull.” She pushed to offer a bounty to hunters who brought in a left wolf paw (lopped off with a chain saw) and extended the kill order to grizzly and black bears — including sows and their cubs. Before a state court ruled the practice illegal, she offered a bounty of $150 for every slain wolf.

Hunting groups support the program, arguing that it increases the availability of game for poor Alaskans, and the sporting chances of hunters like Sarah and Todd Palin themselves, who have their sights set on moose. But wildlife viewing brings far more tourist dollars to the state, where only 14 percent of the population hunts.

Grey wolf (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services)

As John Toppenberg of the Alaskan Wildlife Alliance puts it, the 60,000 square miles where the cull takes place are mainly used by “fat-ass trophy hunters on all-terrain vehicles, not Native peoples who need them for subsistence, with rare exceptions.”

Critics say Palin has shown a strong bias for hunters. Her staff recently wrote a statute that would permit her hand-picked Board of Game, whose seven members all favor killing predators, to operate without written guidelines. Another bill, currently undergoing legal review, would prohibit Alaskans from putting pro-wildlife propositions on the ballot, by declaring wildlife a “state asset” whose fate can be determined only by the state .

To fight a ballot measure against the hunt, Palin’s government spent $400,000 to produce a report countering arguments that the hunt is inhumane and scientifically dubious. Meanwhile, 174 members of the American Society of Mammalogists wrote to Palin, unsuccessfully, to ask her to reevaluate the science.

In 1996 and 2000, Alaskans voted in favor of ballot initiatives to end the aerial hunt. This time, Lt. Governor Sean Parnell put the measure on the primary ballot, ensuring that Republicans — who were turning out in larger-then-usual numbers to vote on their scandal-ridden congressman and senator — would make up the bulk of the voters.

In the Aug. 26 primary, the measure to end aerial predator hunting failed winning only 44 percent of the vote. Parnell’s special assistant, Jason Hooley, said the state was obliged by new statutory language to put the measure on the primary ballot.

Many hunters oppose the aerial kills as cruel and unfair. Interestingly, the stomach-churning film that is circulating on YouTube (it was produced by Defenders of Wildlife), in fact depicts government hunters shooting wolves with tranquilizer darts, in order to study them. “The reality is much more gruesome,” says Toppenberg. “They get hit with buckshot, it goes right through and their blood splatters all over the snow.”

The hunts often take out alpha males, leaving younger animals that don’t know where to make dens or find ungulates at certain times of the year. “Then you have them going into rural villages and eating dogs,” Toppenberg said. “You’re creating wolf problems rather than solving them.”

The program was disturbing enough to have provoked Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) last year to introduce legislation designed to curtail predator-control programs, except as a last resort. Palin denounced the bill, applauding her own programs as “widely recognized for their excellence and effectiveness.”

But Steve Stringham, a wildlife biologist and author of six books about bears, says Alaska has never established what numbers of moose and caribou can be sustained by the environment. If they shoot too many wolves and bears, he noted, “the potential for overgrazing may be high.”

Stringham has lived closely with Alaskan wildlife. He spent the winter of 1972 in the Wrangell Mountains, 100 miles from the nearest grocer. Bagging a moose for eating was a matter of life and death. “In those situations you don’t have a great appreciation for wolves, until you bag your moose. Then you don’t mind the wolves so much.”

He has raised orphaned wolf pups, and had friendly wild wolves sit a few feet away from him. He’s also been out snowshoeing when packs of wolves surrounded him, a harrowing experience. “Part of you is saying to yourself, ‘There’s never been a reported case of wolves attacking and killing a human in North America.’ The other part of you is going, ‘Of course, this wouldn’t be a reported case either.’”

“But trophy hunters were a bigger problem. Before I got my moose I felt like shooting the damn trophy hunters out of the air. “

I reached wildlife biologist Vic Van Ballenberghe on his cellphone in vast Denali National Park, where he’s spent parts of the past 28 years observing moose. Van Ballenberghe is sickened by the atavistic hunting of predators from airplanes, but he’s also worried that willy-nilly wolf slaughter will hurt the moose and caribou.

When moose and caribou get too numerous and overbrowse, the plants don’t grow as well and the resulting food shortage can weaken the animals, leading to disease outbreaks. In the 1970s and ’80s, the slaughter of wolves in the Tanana Flats area, south of Fairbanks, led the moose population to explode from about 2,800 to the current level of 17,000. The moose in that area are sick, Van Ballenberghe said. “We’re waiting for a bad winter and that population will crash.”

The current predator-control program reminds Van Ballenberghe of the 1930s, when Alaskans shot, poisoned and ran down as many wolves and bears as they could. “Blasting wolves from an airplane is not something most people think is a good practice,” he says. “ You can call it anything you want but it’s a pretty ugly business.”

And there’s no convincing evidence that moose or caribou populations are particularly low in most of the area where the hunt is taking place. “Hunters always say there’s not enough game,” said Van Ballenberghe. “No matter how much there is, they always want more.”

In the recent campaign, hunting groups sent fliers to every voter in the state — warning that wolves would kill their dogs, threaten their kids and take food off the table. Some voters found the wording of the initiative confusing.

“We got more than a hundred calls from people who said they’d mistakenly voted the wrong way,” says Toppenberg. Hooley, Parnell’s spokesman, said the wording of the measure had been in place since 2005 and was well-reviewed by its proponents.

Palin’s dismal environmental record makes environmentalists cringe. She’s not convinced that global warming is man-made, sued to stop the listing of polar bears as an endangered species, and moved forward a mining plan that some believe threatens wildlife in Bristol Bay—her daughter’s namesake.

None of this seems to bug Alaskans overmuch. “We’ve got a lot of, ‘Kill them all, let God sort ‘em out’ mentality up here,” says Toppenberg, who was a cop in Colorado before moving to Alaska in the 1990s. “Hopefully, the lower 48 will become aware of the extremeness of Sara Palin’s positions. She’s for cut, kill and drill. Frankly, that’s not even good for tourism.”

David Acheson, the deputy FDA commissioner for food safety, told a news briefing that FDA has also ordered 14 produce recalls in recent months. He didn’t give a comparable figure from a year ago, but said the numbers were obviously higher this year. “We’ve intensified our testing of Mexican produce, and the number of positives we’re getting corresponds with that.” Acheson said that produce contaminated with salmonella had been detected at the border and withdrawn from circulation. He said it was strains other than stpaul, the cause of the outbreak that sickened at least 1,142 people and hospitalized 286 since May.

The CDC issued a study of the outbreak Thursday that concluded it was linked to jalapeno and Serrano peppers; tomatoes might also have been contaminated, it said. Early in the investigation, questionnaires linked the outbreak to tomatoes eaten by Native Americans in New Mexico. However, later investigations of some of the households indicated that many of them also had peppers, though the patients couldnít remember eating them, according to the CDC’s report.

Still Courtesy of: Bigger, Stronger, Faster*

When Mike, Chris and Mark Bell, were striving to become champion iron pumpers in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., the brothers never dreamed that Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hulk Hogan and their other idols were juiced. Steroids were for commies –like Dolph Lundgren in Rocky IV. Rocky himself was clean and sober. He chopped wood to get buff.

But, as they got older, the Bells learned the dirty little secret: their heroes were on ‘roids. The Bells would have to take them too, if they wanted to compete. Years later, Mark—who went by “Mad Dog” when he wrestled for World Wresting Entertainment, the WWE, and “Smelly” Mike – who can bench press 700 pounds– are still using the stuff.

Chris, the middle brother, tried steroids for a few months, stopped and decided to make a movie about them instead. His documentary film, “Bigger, Stronger, Faster: The Side Effects of Being American,” is a hilarious, poignant and thought-provoking look at the hypocritical culture of competition.

“I was brought up to believe that cheaters never prosper,” he narrates, over footage of President George W. Bush speaking against steroid use — though his Texas Rangers used them. “But in America, they always prosper.”

With the Olympics beginning Friday and millions of kids primed to watch their U.S. heroes compete with the world, Bell sadly reflected on what he learned about the clandestine doping that goes on beyond the noble striving for national glory. Bell, 35, spent three years working on the film, which incorporates dozens of interviews and other footage.

“I used to think the Olympics had the best drug testing, but it’s a big façade,” he said in a phone interview. The Balco scandal — in which a San Francisco steroid producer provided hundreds of baseball players with hard-to-trace steroid shots — revealed some of the tricks that trainers use to evade testing. Olympic committees have done little to keep pace with the cheaters, Bell said. “You can skirt the rules on hormones. There’s no test for human-growth hormone. There’s an improved test for Epo [which increases oxygen in the blood], but it won’t be ready for the Olympics.”

“I don’t want to be one of those conspiracy-theory guys, but there are a lot of people juicing,” he said. “You’re never going to have a 100-percent clean Olympics. It’s sad. Kids look up to these people.”

News accounts indicate a certain vigilance against doping Olympic athletes. But the history of such scandals, Bell suggests, is that only the unlucky get caught. During the 1988 games, Jamaican sprinter Ben Johnson lost his gold medal in the 100 meters for steroid use. Carl Lewis, to whom the gold was awarded, had also tested for banned substances in his blood during training. Rather than disqualify him, according to Bell’s well-documented account, the U.S. Olympic Committee changed the rules.

Anabolic steroids became controlled substances in 1990, and are banned by most professional sports associations, but it’s an open secret that you can’t be the best bodybuilder, weight lifter or home run hitter (or swimmer?) without them. And so, people cheat.

Bell’s film, which incorporates his own interviews, news footage and cartoons in a hilarious gallop through the issue, makes two main points about steroid use. The first is that steroids, as bodybuilder Gregg Valentino puts it during the film, “are as American as apple pie” — that the American drive to win trumps the American sense of fairness every time. This, Bell is saying, is what really bothers Congress, which held more hearings about steroids in 2006 than it did on the war in Iraq. Steroids aren’t nearly as dangerous as tobacco, alcohol or dozens of other legal substances, but their use reveals something ugly about America, and not just its athletics industry.

“There’s this assumption that steroids kill, but no one can find the bodies,” Bell said. Valentino has biceps that look like a python swallowing a pig. But Bell shrugs. “Some people just want big arms. If people want to look like freaks, why can’t they? Is it any worse than piercing strange parts of yourself?”

Or as Valentino himself puts it, “I wanted to be big. I couldn’t get taller, so I got wider.”

Bell may be underplaying the potential side effects of steroid use. While it’s true that the scientific evidence of liver damage and hyper-aggressive “roid rage” is mixed, longterm steroid use definitely raises your bloodpressure and unhealthy cholesterol levels, shrinks your testicles and gives you “bitch tits,” in the ineffable phrase of the Bell brothers. It probably also stunts the growth of teenagers. Bell, to be sure, isn’t exactly promoting steroid use. “I know people who’ve been abused by steroids. If you think one minute my brothers are fine and not screwed up in the heads from fact they rely on steroids … when you rely on a drug to do anything, you’re looking for trouble.”

Too, juicing goes against the American sense of fair play. But if Tiger Woods can get laser eye surgery, and students can take legal speed to ace tests, why shouldn’t athletes improve their torque with chemistry? Bell manages to make even Barry Bonds look sympathetic, as the slugger tells the press, “All of you have lied. How would you like it if there were asterisks by your names?”

“Bigger, Stronger, Faster” united Chris Bell’s two obsessions: movies and body-building. A music video he made at community college got him from Poughkeepsie to film school at the University of Southern California. While studying there, he worked as a bouncer, lifted at the famous Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach,and later wrote for the WWE. A short film about tobacco addiction got the attention of the producers of “Farenheit 911″ and “Bowling for Columbine.”

The film achieves something unusual — it manages to convey respect and affection toward subjects whose foibles are hilarious. The narration makes it happen. Bell is schlubby in a Michael Moore kind of way, but unlike Moore, he’s sincere, because the pain is personal. A regular guy in gym clothes and a backwards baseball cap, he depicts America’s identity confusion through his own family’s struggle with obesity, drug use and obfuscation.

In a section about how the wildly under-regulated dietary-supplements industry uses juiced lifters to deceptively sell its products, Bell hires some Mexican guys to make a supplement in his kitchen. “It was all perfectly legal — except for the illegal aliens.”

His brothers are symbolic stand-ins for the conflict. “Smelly’’ is emotionally stable, a loving father who coaches high school football. “Mad Dog” is bipolar, has tried to kill himself, hates his job, drinks too much and takes drugs. They’re both lifetime steroid users.

Ultimately, in this film, we see steroids as just another substance that Americans use to fill emptiness. Bell’s mother is shocked to hear how dependent on them her boys are. “Why did our boys feel like they were not good enough?” she asks. “Mad Dog” responds that he can’t handle a life in which he’s just OK. “I need to attain greatness,” he says. “I know there’s something in here that the rest of the world needs to know about.”

“In my experience, bodybuilders are like little kids in a gorilla suit,” Bell told me. “They pack on armor so nobody can hurt them. When I was lifting weights, I thought I’d be the coolest kids in school if I could bench press the most. It felt good.

“But I found out from the film,” Bell said, “that I’m a much better filmmaker than I am power lifter.”

Ivins, 62, had worked in the development of anthrax vaccines and therapeutic drugs at Fort Detrick, Maryland, with publications going back to 1984. He had participated in 14 published studies on anthrax since the 2001 attacks; his latest paperwill be published Tuesday in the journal Vaccine.

Investigators have long suspected that a government scientist or contractor was responsible for the anthrax mailings to Democratic senators and the news media, which killed five people and crippled the postal service. After initial suspicions of a link to al-Qaeda or other foreign terrorists failed to materialize, the FBI focused on a former colleague of Ivins named Steven Hatfill. Those suspicions also did not pan out, and the government earlier this year paid Hatfill more than $5 million for damaging his reputation.

If, as suspected, Ivins mailed the anthrax spore-laden letters to raise the alarm and generate more resources for bioterrorism defense, his attack can only be considered a dramatic success. Billions have poured into industry contracts and government work aimed at preventing such attacks in the future. Some have speculated that the anthrax mailings were not meant to kill, but only to show how possible it was to send deadly anthrax spores through the mail.

Members of Congress and their witnesses from the world of public health and the food industry spent most of the two days of hearings this week debating whether new FDA regulations were needed for tracing produce. There was also some snark exchanged over the fact that the food industry itself had lobbied for less stringent tracing requirements when Congress issued new food safety guidelines in 2002 as part of the bioterror legislation. At this week’s hearings, the industry called for the FDA to do more.

But there were occasional moments of clarity. “The real place where this started was the identification of tomatoes as the culprit at the CDC,” said Thomas Stenzel, president of the United Fresh Produce Association, at a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on oversight and investigations. While the FDA may have been slow and failed to release information fast enough, Stenzel said, its investigation into the contaminated produce was narrowed to tomatoes based on the CDC’s analysis. This in turn was based on early, apparently flawed epidemiological work done by New Mexico investigators on Navajo Indian reservations. “We didn’t make a mistake,” said an exasperated David Acheson, the FDA’s point man on the crisis. “Our investigation was based on what the states and the CDC told us.”

The culprit was narrowed early to tomatoes, but after more than 1,400 tomato samples had been tested, none turned up positive for Salmonella saintpaul. “The hearing today should be about the CDC and state public health departments,” noted John Shimkus (R-Ill.) the ranking GOP subcommittee member. “That’s where the system failed us.” It’s not a question of pointing fingers–New Mexico reportedly has a small, underfunded public health department, and even the best epidemiologists make mistakes. Tim Jones, state epidemiologist of Tennessee, noted that state public health budgets have sunk over the past decade, despite occasional surges of federal money spurred by scares such as anthrax or pandemic flu. But if the government is to learn anything from this problematic outbreak, which has now caused more than 1,300 cases of illness in 43 states, it ought to begin by looking in the right places.

Gov. Bobby Jindal

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana is young, Southern and right-wing — a set of demographics that Sen. John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee, has sought to draw into his campaign. So why did Jindal last week take himself out of the running for the No. 2 spot on McCain’s ticket? Could it be that his religious conservatism was too much for the Arizona senator and his aides to handle?

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Last month, Jindal signed a law that gives Louisiana school boards a new way to skirt laws banning the teaching of creationism in public schools. Similar legislation, with support from a Seattle group called the Discovery Institute, was introduced but failed in the Florida, Missouri, South Carolina, Alabama and Michigan legislatures. The law gives local school boards a way to challenge the teaching of evolution and other science that they may find politically or religiously repugnant.

The Louisiana law was originally called the Academic Freedom Act, and its language is remarkably anodyne. In fact it’s reminiscent of what you’d hear in a left-wing critical studies classroom; it encourages the school system to “promote critical thinking skills, logical analysis, and open and objective discussion.” Unlike previous attacks, this one clearly hopes to slip through the constitutional ban on the mixing of state and religion by not specifically mentioning the alternative to evolution.

But here’s the rub: “open discussion” in the law refers to the science classroom, specifically when discussing “scientific theories, including but not limited to, evolution, the origins of life, global warming, and human cloning.” If this were really about thinking critically, and not imposing a right-wing religious viewpoint on your science students, the “critical thinking skills” might also refer to the things that you’re liable to read in the Bible, or the heroic interpretation of American history. But no — it’s about raising questions about scientific principles. That’s why leading U.S. scientific organizations asked Jindal to veto the bill, and are concerned that other states might pass it.

The Louisiana House passed the bill, by then redrafted as the Science Education Act, by 94-3; the state Senate by 36-0. According to Barbara Forrest, a Southeastern Louisiana University philosophy professor who testified against the bill, the landslide has two explanations: the legislature is extremely conservative, and those who aren’t Bible literalists fear Jindal’s homeschooled chief of staff, Timmy Teepell, and the Louisiana Family Forum. This lobbying group, which works closely with Jindal, was co-founded by former Louisiana assemblyman Tony Perkins and is loosely associated with his Family Research Council.

“Jindal had his people in the committee rooms during the sessions,” said Forrest, “twisting arms to get what they wanted on this bill and others.”

Jindal’s office did not respond to an email and a phone request for comment about this and other points in this article.
The passage of the bill marks the latest step by religious right activists to get an alternative to Godless Darwinism taught as the driving force behind life on earth.

In 1981, Louisiana passed the Balanced Treatment Act, which required that creationism be taught along with evolution theory. The U.S. Supreme Court smacked down that law in 1987 in Edwards v. Aguillard, closing the door on the open teaching of “creation science” in public schools. Later, the Discovery Institute, a movement of culturally conservative academics, began promoting Intelligent Design—the idea that life and the earth’s forms were too complex to have arisen by spontaneous mutations and change, and therefore must be the work of some kind of creator. This was a supposed “scientific theory” that offered a way around that ban against creationism.

But mainstream science brushes off Intelligent Design as rewarmed creationism, and the courts have agreed. In 2005, U.S. District Judge John E. Jones, a Bush appointee, ruled against the Dover, Penn., school board, finding that Intelligent Design was simply creationism under another name, and thus more appropriate for discussion in church than science class.

The Louisiana law may lead to a more complicated legal fight. The law mentions neither creationism nor Intelligent Design. It permits science teachers, with the approval of local school boards, to supplement textbook material on evolution and other subjects with materials that stimulate “critical thinking.” The state school board could, in theory, overrule local boards if they OK creationist teachings. But first it would have to find out about them. And intervening might not be politically attractive in such a conservative environment.

However, “if the ACLU gets wind of these cases, they’ll jump right in and sue,” says a New Orleans attorney who has followed the proceedings. “It’ll be Dover all over again.”

In neighboring Texas, meanwhile, a proposal before the board of education calls for including the “strengths and weaknesses” of evolution in that state’s science curriculum, which is influential because textbooks prepared for Texas’ giant school system are often sold in other states.

Last year, the Texas Education Assn. (TEA) fired its science director, Chris Comer, for passing along an e-mail from the National Center for Science Education announcing a talk by Dr. Forrest, co-author of the Intelligent Design critique Creationism’s Trojan Horse. Comer’s boss said the e-mail violated the TEA’s “neutrality” on the question.

Comer fired back on July 8, filing a lawsuit that demands her reinstatement as well as a “declaratory judgment that the TEA policy of being ‘neutral’ on the subject of creationism violates the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution.”

Jindal has made no secret of his belief in creationism. Born in 1971, to recent immigrants from the Punjab, he converted to Roman Catholicism in high school and graduated from Brown University with a degree in biology. Instead of going to medical school he became Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, where he studied politics.

As governor, Jindal has had close ties with the religious right. In 1994, in an essay published in the conservative New Oxford Review, he described his participation in the exorcism of a close college friend, a girl who he suspected was possessed by the devil because she was sputtering profanity-laced invective.

In a debate before his landslide election last year, Jindal justified his skepticism of evolution by saying, “there’s no theory in science that could explain how, contrary to the laws of entropy, you could create order out of chaos. There’s no scientific theory that explains how you can create organic life out of inorganic matter. I think we owe it to our children to teach them the best possible modern scientific facts and theories.”

In fact, there is an entire field of scientific inquiry into the chemical origins of life. Arthur Landy, Jindal’s professor of genetics at Brown, joined leading scientist associations who wrote to ask the governor to veto the Science Education Act. “Without evolution, modern biology, including medicine and biotechnology, wouldn’t make sense,” Landy wrote. “Gov. Jindal was a good student in my class when he was thinking about becoming a doctor, and I hope he doesn’t do anything that would hold back the next generation of Louisiana’s doctors.”

Jindal did not respond to the letters from Landy and other scientists.

Jindal is a popular governor — though a recent controversy over a legislative pay hike cost him some support. In any case, in Louisiana, belief in creationism is no political sin. But many observers in the state have their doubts he will make it on the national stage.

“A lot of people love Bobby but only in comparison to [Gov. Kathleen] Blanco, who was here during The Storm [Hurricane Katrina] and was over her head. With her as governor, Nagin as mayor, and the clowns Bush had running FEMA, there wasn’t a competent official between us and the Pope,” said the New Orleans lawyer, who asked to remain anonymous because of his involvement in the case. But while “writing about an exorcism you took part in may not hurt you in Louisiana, on a national platform it could give you serious problems.”

Nice piece of reporting by the AP’s Lauran Neergaard about how shoe-leather Minnesota epidemiologists traced the contaminated jalapenos that seem to be responsible for the supposed tainted-tomato Salmonella outbreak. Alerted about an outbreak in late June in Minnesota, public health officials there interviewed the sick, traced the Salmonella Saintpaul to a particular restaurant, and used credit card receipts to see who had or had not gotten the jalapeno relish on their food, thereby confirming jalapenos as the prime suspect. Then they traced the jalapenos back to a farm in Mexico–where they found Salmonella on a pepper–and from there to a distributor in McAllen, Texas. It took about 10 days to do all this. Michael Osterholm, who has become a big-shot consultant in the bio-terror world, directed the Minnesota public health department for years and seems to have left behind a solid institution. The obvious question: Why were a handful of Minnesota scientists able to quickly resolve an outbreak that stumped the FDA and CDC for four months?

To be sure, no one is positive that all 1,100+ Salmonella Saintpaul infections are jalapeno-related, though there’s no concrete evidence of anything else. Meanwhile, the FDA continues to be accused of providing partial and confusing information about the scare, infuriating the produce industry, which has suffered hundreds of millions in losses.