Radhika Viswanathan | Vox Our world has too much noise and too little context. Vox helps you understand what matters. 2018-12-21T20:39:57+00:00 https://www.vox.com/authors/radhika-viswanathan/rss https://platform.vox.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2024/08/vox_logo_rss_light_mode.png?w=150&h=100&crop=1 Radhika Viswanathan <![CDATA[Why Starbucks, Disney, and the EU are all shunning plastic straws]]> https://www.vox.com/2018/6/25/17488336/plastic-straw-ban-ocean-pollution 2018-12-21T15:39:57-05:00 2018-12-21T15:39:56-05:00

When I ordered a milkshake at a New York City diner recently, I noticed a placard at my table that read: “Missing something in your drink? There’s a reason for that.”

I looked around and saw that none of the drinks on the waiters’ trays had plastic straws. Why was my diner forcing this age-old tradition to an end?

Plastic bans are now in vogue. Several countries, in the name of combating plastic pollution in the ocean, have begun banning various plastic products: utensils, bottles, and bags that often get thrown away after one use. The European Parliament on Wednesday signed a provisional agreement to ban 10 kinds of single-use plastics — including plastic cutlery and straws — by 2021, Popular Science reports.

In the United States, these efforts have centered on the plastic straw.

In July, the Walt Disney Company announced that it would eliminate single-use plastic straws and stirrers in all its locations by mid-2019 as part of its “journey of environmental stewardship.” Disney also plans to reduce other plastic products in its hotels and cruise ships as well as plastic shopping bags and styrofoam cups.

Starbucks made a similar announcement, saying it would transition to a new lid for cold drinks that many have likened to an “adult sippy cup” that eventually will mean eliminating more than 1 billion plastic straws per year.

Seattle, the home of the mega coffee company, became the first major US city with a plastic straw ban on July 1. New York City has proposed legislation to ban plastic straws in the city by 2020. Malibu and San Luis Obispo, California, and Miami Beach and Fort Myers, Florida, have similar efforts in the works.

There’s also a trending hashtag, #StopSucking. Chelsea Clinton, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Russell Crowe, Tom Brady, Sonam Kapoor, and Tom Felton have all pledged to “just say no” when handed a plastic straw.

Why did banning the plastic straw — something so small and forgettable that it tends not to be recycled — go viral as a form of consumer environmentalism?

Straws are far from our biggest problem when it comes to marine plastic pollution. And they are necessary for people with certain disabilities, who feel that they have been left out of the conversation. But activists hope that straws will be a “gateway plastic,” encouraging people to forgo other single-use plastics such as bags and bottles.

Straw bans aren’t going to save the ocean, but they could jump-start much-needed conversations about the level of non-biodegradable trash in it.

Let’s walk through what we know.

Why is plastic such a big problem in the ocean?

We started using plastic in the late 19th century, after celluloid was invented. By the 1960s and ’70s, single-use plastics like bags and straws had become cheaper, more convenient, and more ubiquitous than their paper counterparts.

Now plastic straws can be found pretty much anywhere food is served (with the exception of the highest-end restaurants). And while the exact number of straws thrown out in the US today is unclear, one estimate we found (using data from Technomics) put it at 175 million straws every day.

Plastic is not biodegradable, which means it does not break down into compounds (like carbon dioxide or water) that can be easily reused.

Large plastics will, over time, degrade into small particles known as microplastics. Not only are microplastics potentially carcinogenic on their own, but they also attract harmful pollutants. And they stick around forever.

Because plastic doesn’t decompose quickly, when it becomes waste, it tends to either end up in landfills or wash into the ocean. The World Economic Forum reports that there are 150 million metric tons of plastics in the ocean. And if we continue this trend, scientists predict there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050.

One of the landmark studies of ocean plastic was published in Science in 2015. The researchers found that we generated 275 million metric tons of plastic waste in one year, of which 4.8 million to 12.7 million metric tons get into the oceans.

“Eight million metric tons of plastic is equal to 5 bags … filled with plastic going into the ocean along every foot of coastline in the world,” said the lead author of the study, Jenna Jambeck, at an American Association for the Advancement of Science panel in 2015. “That is huge.”

(Around that time, a YouTube video of a sea turtle with a straw lodged in its nose also went viral, racking up more than 26 million views.)

Plastic kills marine life partially because of strangulation or choking. But the larger reason plastic is so dangerous is that it releases toxic chemicals like bisphenol-A (BPA) when it breaks down. BPA, which mimics estrogen, messes with our hormones and can be carcinogenic. A recent study found that plastic also kills coral reefs by making them more susceptible to disease.

Microplastics will inevitably get into our food — through both the fish on our plates and the water in our bottles. But researchers still aren’t sure how toxic microplastics are when we consume them this way.

A lot of this plastic collects in “garbage patches” that form as waste and debris get pushed together by circular ocean currents known as gyres. These patches are not solid masses; rather, they are mostly made up of microplastics that make the water cloudy and gelatinous. At about twice the size of Texas, the largest garbage patch is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which has been given the horrifying moniker the Pacific Trash Vortex.

But garbage patches only provide a surface-level glimpse of the issue — literally. Only about 1 percent of plastic waste collects at the surface; most of it aggregates at the floor of the ocean, where deep-sea sediments behave as a sink for the microplastics.

Why is everyone focusing on the straw?

Several environmental organizations have made straw bans a priority lately — raising awareness, nudging celebrities to come out in favor of them, lobbying cities and states to enact them. But some advocates told me their deeper motivation is to build support and awareness for the need to ban other plastic products that are more significant sources of plastic solution than straws.

“Our straw campaign is not really about straws,” said Dune Ives, the executive director of Lonely Whale, the organization that led the straw ban movement in Seattle. “It’s about pointing out how prevalent single-use plastics are in our lives, putting up a mirror to hold us accountable. We’ve all been asleep at the wheel.”

Lonely Whale’s “Strawless in Seattle” movement began in September 2017, when the organization began partnering with Seattle-based businesses to end their straw use.

According to Ives, the plastic straw was really a first step in asking people more important questions about their plastic use. From talking to restaurant owners, they learned that one of their biggest sources of plastics is the individual wrapping on shellfish and oysters. “They all asked, ‘Why is that?’ Which is a really good question,” Ives said. “So the straw becomes this gateway conversation that makes you realize how pervasive and ubiquitous the problem is.”

The mayor of Seattle has since announced a ban on disposable plastic straws, spoons, forks, and knives, which will be officially enforced starting July 1. As of now, the ban will only apply to restaurants; those who are found in violation will be fined up to $250.

But Seattle’s success has already inspired several other coastal cities in states like California and Florida to follow suit.

Plastic straws “may not be the biggest threat to the ocean health … but we were actually hearing from our audiences about it,” said Aimee David, the director of Ocean Conservation Policy Strategies at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. “This is something that really resonates from our visitors because they can feel it, touch it; it’s a positive action they can take.”

On the other side of the country, New York City may vote on legislation to ban the plastic straw this year. “We’re very much at the beginning; we’re at the stage that people are starting to realize the impact that we’re having,” said John Calvelli, executive vice president of public affairs at the Wildlife Conservation Society, which has spearheaded the New York policy push with the Give a Sip campaign. “What’s happening is that people are waking up.”

How effective are plastic straw bans, really?

We know there’s a massive amount of plastic in our oceans, but plastic straws are far from the biggest source of plastic pollution.

The Ocean Conservancy’s 2017 Coastal Cleanup Report compiled beach cleanups around the world and found that the most common trash item found on beaches is cigarettes, followed by plastic bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, and bags. Straws and stirrers placed seventh on the list, at about 3 percent of the total trash. Bloomberg News estimates that on a global scale, straws would probably only account for 0.03 percent of total plastic waste by mass. Another study found that an estimated 46 percent of the debris in the ocean is abandoned fishing equipment.

On a macro scale, it’s important to look at the plastic straw ban for what it really is: a first step toward drastically limiting plastic in the ocean.

How realistic is that leap?

Part of the answer to this question can be found in a little-known theory called “spillover” —the idea that engaging in a single behavior can psychologically motivate us to engage in either more or less similar behaviors.

Let’s say we were interested in learning what would happen once people begin following a plastic straw ban. They may decide to become more environmental by decreasing the use of other single-use products or supporting environmental policy change (which is called positive spillover), they may decide that their one good deed gives them the right to take an extra-long shower (negative spillover), or they may pat themselves on the back and continue living their lives as usual (no spillover).

The plastic straw ban advocates are essentially hoping for a positive spillover effect.

Heather Truelove, an associate professor of psychology at the University of North Florida, has studied the spillover effect with environmental decisions.

In order to minimize negative spillover, Truelove believes that we need to “feel good about our actions, but not too good.”

“The biggest problem for spillover is having an external motivation for behavior,” she said. A government-imposed ban is an example of this “external motivation” that she says could “become worrisome because people will stop using the plastic straw but won’t internalize [the lesson].”

Turns out, internalizing an action — making it part of your identity as an environmentalist —is the key to promoting positive spillover. And Truelove has found that in most cases regarding the environment, we do see positive spillover.

“When you go into a restaurant and you don’t get a straw with your drink, it can spark some conversation; it becomes something that you discuss with your family,” she said. “Your attitudes and beliefs about plastic become salient and more on the tip of your tongue.”

The bad news: We don’t actually know what behaviors the straw ban should spill over into.

Who needs plastic straws?

A lot of people actually need straws because they have disabilities that make it difficult to lift a drink to their lips. And disability rights advocates are now speaking out against the bans, arguing that straw alternatives don’t work quite as well.

In an article in the Washington Post, writer and disability advocate Karin Hitselberger noted that the plastic straw ban is part of a tradition of movements that don’t consider the opinions or needs of people with disabilities. “If you don’t need a straw to take a sip of water, pain medication to deal with the effects of a chronic illness, or a laptop to take notes in your college class, it can be easy to overlook how policies such as these impact someone else’s everyday life,” she wrote.

After Starbucks announced its plan to phase out all single-use plastic straws, a group of disabilities rights advocates planned to protest outside a New York City Starbucks store. In response, the company reached out to the groups and released a statement promising to keep plastic straws on hand for those who need them.

What else can we do to keep plastic out of the ocean?

“That’s the million-dollar question,” Aimee David, with the Monterey Bay Aquarium, said with a laugh.

Our current method of recycling is likely not the answer. Plastic is difficult to recycle more than two or three times, and a study conducted last year found that only 9 percent of all plastic has been recycled. “Without a well-designed and tailor-made management strategy for end-of-life plastics, humans are conducting a singular uncontrolled experiment on a global scale, in which billions of metric tons of material will accumulate across all major terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems on the planet,” the study authors wrote.

One of the most popular methods of mitigating the accumulation of plastic in the first place is what David called a “source-reduction approach.” That means eliminating use of those pesky single-use plastics, with policies like bag and straw bans.

Restricting single-use plastics has worked in other countries. In 2002, Ireland imposed a tax on plastic bags, which was followed by a 94 percent decrease in the use of plastic bags.

A big part of the single-use plastic ban is an expectation that people will carry non-plastic equivalents, such as metal straws and utensils, with them. Aardvark, a straw manufacturing company, has been increasing production of high-quality paper straws, which they claim are better the cheaper paper straws imported from China that often degrade in drinks.

A change in norms is the main reason the tax in Ireland was so effective; Elisabeth Rosenthal reported in the New York Times article that using plastic bags in Ireland actually became “socially unacceptable” a few years into the tax.

As of 2017, 28 countries had imposed bans or taxes on plastic bags, with varying levels of enforcement. The United States is not one of them.

Recently, Britain, Scotland, Chile, India, Taiwan, and the EU have announced plans to phase out all single-use plastics over the next decade. And earlier this month, Ikea announced its plan to end the sale of all single-use products by 2020.

Although there is no national movement to ban plastic bags in the United States yet, several cities and states have taken it up. In 2014, California became the first state to ban plastic bags, and 16 other states since have imposed bans or taxes on plastic bags.

But beyond source reduction, there is no real systemic plan. Long-term issues of reducing abandoned fishing gear, developing materials that can replace plastic, and creating new waste management systems still persist.

What we need, according to Ives, is to have a “big conversation” about how to reduce the plastic demand.

“We know that with plastic straw bans, it’s not like it’s going to stop plastic production,” she said. “It’s great to see recycling and waste management, but we have to start demanding plastic production reduction.”

This seems daunting. But David points to the fact that ocean plastic has only just become such a hot topic, and as a result, the research has also picked up a sense of urgency. “I think that we don’t even know what the biggest solution is yet,” David said.

In the meantime, here are some other things you can do to lower your plastic consumption:

  • Bring a reusable bag to the grocery store, and keep reusing it.
  • Replace plastic bottles and utensils with metal ones. Some coffee shops, including Starbucks, will even knock a few cents off your coffee if you bring your own bottle.
  • Buy non-perishable food such as beans, rice, pasta, and other grains, in bulk to reduce packaging, and take your own reusable containers to the store to avoid bags.
  • Pack lunches/snacks in reusable containers instead of plastic baggies.
  • Bring your own reusable containers to restaurants. Most will let you use your own container for takeout or to pack leftovers.

And of course, it can’t hurt to say no to the straw (or try one of these reusable ones).

Further reading:

We know ocean plastic is a problem. We can’t fix it until we answer these 5 questions.

]]> Julia Belluz Radhika Viswanathan <![CDATA[The problem with all the plastic that’s leaching into your food]]> https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/9/11/17614540/plastic-food-containers-contamination-health-risks 2018-12-04T17:22:28-05:00 2018-12-04T17:22:26-05:00
Many people store their lunches and leftovers in plastic — but don’t realize there’s plastic in their food. | Getty Images/EyeEm

Consider what you’ve eaten today. Perhaps you drank juice from a plastic bottle and coffee from a Keurig pod. For breakfast, you might have had fruit with yogurt. Your lunch salad may have been packed in a plastic container.

There’s a good chance much of what you ingested was packaged, stored, heated, lined, or served in plastic. And unfortunately, there’s mounting scientific evidence that these plastics are harming our health, from as early as our time in our mother’s womb.  

Most of our food containers — from bottles to the linings in aluminum cans to plastic wraps and salad bins — are made using polycarbonate plastics, some of which have bioactive chemicals, like bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates.

These man-made chemicals can leach from the containers or wrappings into the food and drinks they’re holding — especially when they’re heated. Research released earlier this year found that more than 90 percent of bottled water from the world’s leading brands was contaminated with microplastics, sparking a review of plastics in drinking water by the World Health Organization.

The main cause for concern is that these chemicals can mess with our hormones. Specifically, they can mimic hormones like estrogen, interfere with important hormone pathways in the thyroid gland, and inhibit the effects of testosterone.

Hormones are essential to the body’s ability to regulate itself; they function like little messengers, floating through the bloodstream and triggering different organs and systems to work together. Now imagine eating something that has a similar structure to your hormones and can act like hormones in your body. It can interfere with the delicate balance our bodies need to maintain. And that’s what ingesting even low doses of chemicals from plastic, over years, can do.

But because we’re exposed to these chemicals from many sources simultaneously, it’s tricky to measure their health impact. Even so, there’s compelling evidence that their “endocrine disrupting” capabilities have a range of disturbing health effects, from an increased risk of obesity and diabetes to problems with reproductive development.

“Whatever organ or system under development in the fetus or child during an exposure could be altered in subtle yet significant ways, even at low doses,” Tom Neltner, the chemicals policy director at the Environmental Defense Fund, told Vox.

That’s why a major pediatricians group, the American Academy of Pediatrics, in July called on families to limit their use of plastic food containers and demanded “urgently needed” oversight and reforms to the way these substances are regulated in the US.

But right now, that’s not happening. So, as pediatricians have suggested, you might want to rethink the plastics your food is stored in. Here’s what you need to know.

The complicated — and disturbing — science of plastics and animal health  

The impact of the chemicals in plastics we commonly use for food storage have been studied in both animals and humans. And depending on the type of plastic polymer, the health effects vary from inconclusive to disturbing.

First, let’s walk through some of the animal research since it’s important here. (Researchers running animal experiments can zero in on which doses of which chemicals cause certain health effects, something they can’t do in human studies — more on that later.) And let’s start with the most feared plastic polymer: BPA.

In aquatic animals, which are important models for human disease, BPA disrupts hormones in a variety of ways: as an estrogen imitator, blocking other sex hormones, and disrupting the thyroid hormone system. Researchers have noted that BPS, a compound that is structurally very similar to BPA, has similar effects on aquatic animals, but using BPS means manufacturers can claim their products are BPA-free.

In 2012, Harvard researchers published a study showing the effect of BPA on oocyte development (oocytes are the precursors to female eggs) in rhesus monkeys. By either directly feeding the monkeys BPA or giving them an implant that would release specific amounts of BPA, the scientists ensured BPA exposures in the monkeys were comparable to exposures in humans. They found disruption in two critical stages of egg development, which could lead to lower egg quality and decreased fertility.

A 2008 meta-analysis of existing literature looked specifically into the effect of phthalates and polyvinyl chloride (or PVC) on asthma and allergies. They brought together mouse studies, case studies, and epidemiological data. While the human data was inconclusive, the review concluded that certain phthalates can cause an inflammatory response in mice.

A review published in 2009 looked at the existing literature on how plastic ingestion affects people and animals. It reported a wide range of effects that have been observed over the years: For example, adult male rats orally fed phthalates in oil had dysfunctional sperm development. Mice and guinea pigs fed phthalates also had testicular damage.

One of the biggest problems with drawing conclusions from animal studies is that many of them involve very high doses — several orders of magnitude higher than anything humans are exposed to, explained Dr. Frederick Vom Saal, an endocrinologist and professor emeritus at the University of Missouri and one of the authors of the 2009 review. And that’s because much of the early research into plastic consumption was conducted by toxicologists, rather than endocrinologists.

“For toxins, the more you’re exposed to, the greater the effect. [But] that is not true of hormones,” he said. “Hormones aren’t toxins; they’re regulatory molecules that operate at a trillionth of a gram level.”

In fact, hormones — and plastics that mimic hormones — are part of complex feedback systems in our bodies and don’t have a linear effect that’s directly related to dose. Vom Saal and his colleagues published a study in 2012 that found DEHP, a phthalate found in food packaging, had adverse reproductive effects in doses up to 25,000 times lower than had been previously imagined. They also noticed reproductive tract malformations in the male offspring of mice that were fed DEHP in oil.

Altogether, the animal research suggests that plastics can be harmful, especially to animals’ reproductive systems, and can cause abnormal sperm, egg, and fetal development.

The human data isn’t very reassuring

But again, not every health issue that arises in animals will arise in humans — since humans and animals are different. And definitive human studies of health effects from plastics exposure are hard to come by. That’s because the studies are mostly epidemiological — with epidemiological studies, researchers can only talk about associations between exposures and certain health outcomes. In other words, they can’t find causal relationships.

Another issue: It’s not always clear what compounds a package is made of because manufacturing plastic polymers also yields a lot of byproducts that aren’t necessarily tested for safety. Which means it’s hard to design studies to understand the effects of any single chemical.

Even so, Carl-Gustaf Bornehag, a researcher and professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, summed up, “Chemicals related to plastics — BPA in polycarbonates and phthalates in soft polyvinyl chloride — have been shown to be associated to human health effects in numerous studies, and effects have been shown in experimental cell and animal studies as well, supporting the finding in humans.”

Reviews of the literature on the human health effects of chemicals in plastics have demonstrated links between exposures to BPA, phthalates, and other plastics additives and reduced fertility, reduced male sexual function and sperm quality, blunted immune function, Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and obesity. In fetuses, BPA exposure was correlated with an increased risk of miscarriage, low birth weight, and childhood obesity.

There are also potential cognitive effects. “Particularly strong are the associations between early BPA exposure and altered behavior and disrupted neurodevelopment in children, as well as increased probability of childhood wheeze and asthma,” the author of one of the reviews wrote. Indeed, children are at particular risk of health effects from these chemicals, AAP said: “Hormones act on all parts of the body, and even small disruptions at key moments in development can have permanent and lifelong consequences.”

A 2015 systematic review of children’s neurodevelopment and phthalate exposure concluded that prenatal exposure to phthalates was associated with “cognitive and behavioral outcomes in children, including lower IQ, and problems with attention, hyperactivity, and poorer social communication.” Newer research has linked prenatal phthalate exposure to an increased risk of language development delays.

While it’s true that many companies are now manufacturing phthalate- or BPA-free products, scientists are concerned about substitute chemicals, too. Again, many of them are functionally similar to the chemicals of concern, like BPA and BPS.

“The weight of the human evidence [on BPA] continues to mount,” Sheela Sathyanarayana, an associate professor of pediatrics in the department of environmental and occupational health at the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Research Institute, summed up. “For phthalates, I do not see any controversies related to male reproductive toxicity, and the weight of the evidence is extremely strong. I now consistently say phthalates ‘cause’ male reproductive abnormalities because the weight of the evidence supports it.”

The regulation of chemicals in food containers is weak

Right now, it’s up to consumers to manage their exposures to the chemicals in plastics because of a surprising lack of regulatory oversight over the plastic packaging industry.

In 1997, the FDA established the Packaging and Food Contact Substances program — a regulatory system to determine what packaging products were safe. So anyone who manufactures a “food contact substance,” which includes chemical additives, coatings, paper, or polymers, must first get the okay from the FDA before putting it on the market.

The exception to this rule is substances considered “Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS)” — a category that was created for food items with a long history of use, like caffeine or sugar, and no evidence of harmful side effects.

But the list of GRAS-accepted polymers in packaging is long — some say too long. And it’s been criticized, most recently by the AAP. In August, members of the AAP’s Council on Environmental Health noted just how easy it is to get into the GRAS category due to very little oversight and significant conflict of interest. It’s one of the “critical problems within the food regulatory system,” they said, and it means these potentially harmful chemicals can be used in food packaging.

That’s because the FDA doesn’t actually test things that get put on this list. It leaves the decision up to the manufacturing companies themselves. Consumer Reports noted that these companies don’t need to show any peer-reviewed evidence before placing their products on the GRAS list.

The US Government Accountability Office has reported that regulations for GRAS products need to be tightened. An article published in PLOS Biology last year also criticized GRAS as part of the larger issue of “sluggish” federal regulatory policy that has failed in “considering scientific knowledge about the impact of exposures —particularly at low levels and during susceptible developmental stages.”

And last year, a group made of the Center for Food Safety, Breast Cancer Prevention Partners, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the Environmental Working Group sued the FDA over the “secret GRAS system,” calling it “a regulatory scheme in which potentially unsafe chemical substances can be added to food based on conclusions by self-interested food and chemical manufacturers.”

In addition to the GRAS list, the AAP called out lack of proper assessment of controversial plastic packaging products like BPA and phthalates. “Of the nearly 4,000 food additives listed on the FDA’s Substances Added to Food website, data for effects on reproductive organs are available for less than 300, and only two have information about effects on development,” the group said in a statement.

One reason for this uncertainty is that our manufacturing abilities have whizzed past the slow nature of evidence-based research. Again, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to get the kind of evidence that would guarantee complete safety on these products, so the burden of proof is on regulators instead of manufacturers.

Another more insidious reason regulators may have been dismissive of scientists’ concerns is lobbying by the chemical industry. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit organization that tracks lobbying efforts, Dow Chemical, a plastics manufacturer, spent close to $14 million in 2016 on lobbying Congress and federal agencies. And the American Chemistry Council — a large umbrella organization that lobbies on behalf of plastic manufacturers, among other groups — has spent between $5 million and $13 million on lobbying annually since 2009.

Regulators have also been criticized for their research into BPA’s health risks. The FDA-led CLARITY-BPA study, which began in 2012 and was released in the form of a draft report in February, gave BPA the green light, with a press announcement calling it “safe for the currently authorized uses in food containers and packaging.”

The final study is slated to come out sometime in September, and will be considered with results from other government-sponsored BPA studies at universities. This initial report’s early, positive conclusions were alarming to scientists who have been studying the chemical. In April, the Endocrine Society released a statement saying it had “significant concerns with the conclusions of the [report]” and criticized the methods and design of the CLARITY study.

What you can do to limit your exposure

In the absence of stronger regulations, there are things you can do to limit your exposure to chemicals in food:

  • Eat fresh fruits and vegetables when possible, so that you avoid plasticized storage containers with chemicals that can leach into your foods.
  • Don’t microwave food or drinks (including infant formula and pumped human milk) in plastic since heating up food containers increases the release of chemicals into food. Use glassware instead.
  • Opt for glass or stainless steel to store your food.
  • Avoid plastics with recycling codes 3 (which means it contains phthalates), 6 (styrene), and 7 (bisphenols).

But even if you do all these things, it’s impossible to totally avoid these common chemicals. BPA can be found on sales receipts and in plastic utensils. As a recent story in GQ, about the declining sperm count in men, points out, phthalates are even more ubiquitous:

They are in the coatings of pills and nutritional supplements; they’re used in gelling agents, lubricants, binders, emulsifying agents, and suspending agents. Not to mention medical devices, detergents and packaging, paint and modeling clay, pharmaceuticals and textiles and sex toys and nail polish and liquid soap and hair spray.

And the plastics that we may not directly consume end up in landfills, where they break down into microplastics and can absorb harmful pollutants — all of which can enter our oceans, water, and food supply. So it’s no surprise that just about all Americans have measurable amounts of phthalates and BPA in their bodies. Still, any effort to reduce your exposure is probably worth it.

]]> Radhika Viswanathan <![CDATA[There’s a surprisingly rich debate about how to define death]]> https://www.vox.com/2018/8/6/17635098/jahi-mcmath-2018-brain-death-definition 2018-08-04T17:45:40-04:00 2018-08-06T07:00:01-04:00 What is death, really? 

Turns out there’s no true consensus among doctors, bioethicists, and philosophers. The way death is determined can even change as you cross state lines.

Is it when our brains completely shut down? Is it when parts of our brains stop working? Is it when our hearts or lungs stop working? Is it when we lose the ability to think?

The line can be blurry, especially now that we have technology to keep organs functioning. Because of these artificial ways of sustaining life, differentiating death from life sometimes falls outside of the boundaries of science, according to Robert Veatch, professor emeritus of medical ethics at Georgetown University and the senior research scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics. “It reflects the intersection of medical science and philosophy and religion,” he said.

He believes that the question of whether someone has died is really: “What is important about an individual that makes him one of us? … It’s only in one in 1,000 cases, maybe, that we’ve got some of the key indicators of life but not others, and then we have a fight.”

Most recently, there was the case of 17-year-old Jahi McMath, who was first pronounced dead five years ago after a tonsillectomy in 2013 went awry and left her brain-dead.

Brain death refers to the death of the brain stem: the part of the brain that controls basic body functions like breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, and consciousness.

But McMath was connected to a ventilator, and her heart continued to beat (the heart has an internal pacemaker, so it needs only regular oxygen to beat). Her mother, grandmother, and other family members believed that this meant she was still alive, and fought to keep her connected to a ventilator. The story became the subject of a lengthy New Yorker profile by Rachel Aviv.

A photo of Jahi McMath is shown at funeral services for McMath at Acts Full Gospel Church in Oakland, Calif., Friday, July 6, 2018.

After doctors in California declared her dead, McMath was transported to a hospital in New Jersey, which kept her on the life-sustaining treatment until she finally died of liver failure on June 22. But the battle is not over yet. According to the New Yorker, the family, who is African American, felt they were discriminated against (racism, no doubt, runs deep through the American medical system). McMath’s family is currently planning to file a wrongful-death suit against the hospital that declared her brain-dead, as well as a federal civil rights case.

Over the past few decades, other cases — like those of Terri Schiavo, Nancy Cruzan, Karen Ann Quinlan, and Marlise Muñoz — have sparked similar national debates about what rights an unresponsive person has, what rights their families have, and what a hospital’s responsibility is.

Typically, older people have advance directives or have otherwise made their end-of-life wishes known. So the ambiguous cases often involve young people whose parents disagree with doctors.

Most death determination is left to medical professionals, as it should be. But in these rare cases of uncertainty, when death actually has room for interpretation and the patient’s wishes are unclear, family members sometimes feel doctors don’t give their opinions enough respect.

Trying to understand what death means can help decide the best way to determine when someone has died. And beyond the medical ramifications, it turns out that untangling death actually tells us a lot about what it means to be alive.

The “official” way to determine death

The past century saw a burst in the development of medical technology that helps us sustain life. The “iron lung,” or precursor to the modern-day ventilator, was invented in 1928. The heart was first defibrillated — shocked back into its natural rhythm — in 1947, and we can now implant defibrillators right into the heart. Organ transplants also started in the mid-1900s.

Before all this technology, our organs and body parts were considered to be interdependent; when one part died, the whole body died. But these advancements changed the interdependent nature of our bodies; some parts could be artificially maintained even while other parts died. So the definition of death had to be clarified.

Initial drafts of a definition that incorporated brain death were criticized for sympathizing with the need for organ donors — a criticism that still exists for the current definition of brain death. After several iterations, the American Medical Association, the American Bar Association, and the President’s Commission on Medical Ethics finally developed the 1981 Uniform Determination of Death Act.

The Uniform Determination of Death is not a definition; it’s merely a guide that each state can adapt to determine how they legally decide whether someone has died. All 50 states have adopted it, with minor changes.

The act states: “An individual who has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem, is dead.”

In most cases, these criteria are easy to follow and don’t incite controversy.

The first category is usually pretty obvious; you can literally see a person’s heart or breathing stop. That’s how most people are declared deceased. But family members often find it hard to wrap their heads around what loss of brain function means.

“[Brain death] can be difficult for clinicians and families to understand. The patient looks the same immediately before and after the declaration of death by neurologic criteria, with the ventilator and whatever medications or interventions are sustaining cardiac function,” said Hannah Lipman, a physician and the director of bioethics at the Hackensack University Medical Center.

The criteria outlined by the Uniform Declaration of Death Act doesn’t cover some of the rarer cases, when people lose part or most of their brain function. For example, the act doesn’t say anything about people in persistent vegetative states (in which their brain stem still functions but they have no ability for higher-level thinking).

“It’s very confusing to people. Because on the one hand, personality is gone, the higher brain, the cerebrum,” said Steven Luper, a professor of philosophy at Trinity University who specializes in the philosophy of death. “But you could have a live brain stem. So they have a heartbeat, sometimes they can even breathe, they go through sleep-wake cycles, they can open their eyes.”

“So what we are in terms of having self-awareness, having mental ties to your various stages of life — that’s all gone,” he continued. “So you’ve got this clash of what appears to be a human animal — and death seems to be tied to that — and yet personality is removed.” 

The problem with defining death

Even with the Uniform Determination of Death Act, the definition of death can be contentious for bioethicists.

“The best definition for death is a very trivial one: ceasing to alive,” Luper said. “And then, of course, that prompts us to try to be clearer on what it is to be alive.”

So the definition of death really hinges on the question of what it means to be human. There are basically three schools of thought.

The first is that we are organisms, and that our existence is dependent on our organ systems functioning. “This group would say your brain could be completely gone, and gone for years, at least theoretically, and the individual could still be alive,” said Veatch.

This is considered a “circulatory-based” approach, according to Veatch. And a lot of religious people — including Jahi McMath’s family — follow these criteria. 

So what would death look like for someone in this group?

“Death for an organism would be something roughly like its ceasing to engage in the various biological activities by which it develops and perpetuates itself, things like respiration and blood circulation,” said Luper.

This approach is essentially the first set of criteria outlined by the Uniform Declaration of Death Act.

The second method of defining who we are falls at the other end of the spectrum; it is the idea that a person is alive as long as any part of their brain is functioning. “That’s typically called the whole brain view now,” said Veatch. “And it’s the law almost everywhere in the world.”

This definition of being alive is why McMath was declared dead in California even though her heart was kept beating by a ventilator. But it is also why people in persistent vegetative states are not declared dead — they’re not brain-dead, but as far as we know, they also don’t have cognitive abilities. At the same time, people in persistent vegetative states have also recovered to either partial or full consciousness.

Imagine a person’s functioning and healthy brain is removed and placed into a new body, and their original body is destroyed. Is the person alive? If you agree with the first category of people, who think we are purely organisms, you would say not, since the original body doesn’t exist. If you fall in the second category and think our existence is dependent on our brains, you would say we are, since the brain has been transplanted. But neither answer seems quite right.

Enter the third view, which is more nuanced. This view says that certain parts of the brain are central to making us human, while other parts are not as important. For example, having higher brain functions such as personality and cognition, most of which are controlled by our frontal lobes, is more important than having a gag reflex or secreting hormones. But executing this practice is pretty complicated.

“If you think we’re self-aware beings, then, well, you’re gone as soon as parts of the brain permit self-awareness cease to exist, and then that’s all that’s relevant,” said Luper. “So they could easily say that death occurs, and yet the human animal is still there, alive.”

Within this third group still exists the question of what self-awareness means. Is it simply consciousness? Or something more than that? Would someone with severe dementia be considered self-aware?

Don’t worry, bioethicists and philosophers don’t really have an answer to all these questions either.

How leaving the decision up to families can help 

All these debates are fascinating and important. But what’s the practical upshot? Most people who study death don’t think that we’re close to coming to a uniform consensus on what death really is.

This is a case where science does not have the answer. So why not leave it up to the patient’s loved ones? That is what Veatch believes. 

“In my view, when we have those fights over what’s valuable about human life, there’s no way they’re going to be resolved,” he said. “So we might as well let [families] make their own value judgments based on their views of what’s important.”

Veatch argues that McMath’s mother’s beliefs should have been the final word: “For cases that are in the news today like Jahi McMath, as long as the mother was of the view that if she’s alive while she’s circulating blood, that’s good enough. She should have been classified as alive.”

And in the opposite scenario, if the family member of someone in a persistent vegetative state believes they should be taken off artificial life support, that should be allowed as well.

Veatch, along with physician Lainie Ross, recently delved into this argument — that families should have a greater say when their loved ones are unresponsive — in their book Defining Death: The Case for Choice.

McMath’s family transferred her from California to New Jersey, one of two states (the other being New York) where families are allowed to bypass the brain death criteria if it does not align with personal or religious beliefs. Instead, they can ask to use only the cardiopulmonary criteria: the rule that death comes with the irreversible stop of breathing and heartbeat. 

Lipman works at the Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey. As a bioethicist, she is called to navigate these questions and typically sees between one and three families a year with religious objections to the brain death criteria. And if we’re looking for some uniformity in what all humans want, she’s found an answer: We want to be heard.

“When the Bioethics Consultation Service is asked to help address an ethics question, I go and do a lot of listening to the people involved. I’ll hear from the family to understand their experience, their belief system, and their understanding of the medical situation,” said Lipman. “I listen to the clinical team to understand what their perspective is. There’s no substitute for the magic that can happen when people listen to each other and understand each other’s experience.”

Yes, there are some challenges with having families decide whether they believe brain death should equate to death. It’s not clear if Medicaid should fund hospital stays after a person is declared brain-dead. (McMath’s mother funded her transfer to New Jersey via GoFundMe.) How long should a body be kept alive with machines? What if different family members have opposing views? What if the dying person is a registered organ donor?

More importantly, these complications around determining death usually happen when a person’s prognosis is dire. For loved ones, it’s not about a hope for a cure; rather, it’s about having the time to accept and grieve.

“I’ve worked with families whose religious beliefs do not allow for death to be declared by neurologic criteria,” said Lipman. “Who still understand that their loved one is very sick, dying, and not going to recover. They may ask that the ventilator be continued until cessation of cardiac function.”

Sometimes, giving the family the reins is about respect. The McMath family’s biggest complaint is that they did not feel their opinion was acknowledged. As Jahi’s mother told the New Yorker, “No one was listening to us, and I can’t prove it, but I really feel in my heart: if Jahi was a little white girl, I feel we would have gotten a little more help and attention.” 

Perhaps the years-long emotional and legal battle could have been avoided had the family been allowed to come to terms with McMath’s death on their own accord.

“Explaining that process [of dying] to families, it really requires a lot of love, support, relationship-building, and trust, and understanding of values,” said Lipman.

]]> Radhika Viswanathan <![CDATA[3 biological parents, 1 child, and an international controversy]]> https://www.vox.com/2018/7/24/17596354/mitochondrial-replacement-therapy-three-parent-baby-controversy 2018-08-14T13:49:36-04:00 2018-07-28T10:00:06-04:00

When scientists discover a new way to prevent disease or overcome infertility, they usually get applauded. But throw genetic engineering into the mix and it gets dicey fast. Genetic engineering in reproductive medicine is particularly scary because we’re talking about changing the genes of future generations. So any new technique is sure to incite controversy, especially in the United States.

That’s what’s happened with a relatively new procedure that doctors have begun using to help couples avoid passing down genetic mutations that cause mitochondrial disease to their children. (For those of you who haven’t read about the mitochondria since high school, a refresher awaits you below.)

This mitochondrial replacement therapy, or MRT, has made headlines for producing “three-parent babies” because it involves replacing the mitochondrial DNA of an embryo that has a risk of mitochondrial disease with healthy mitochondrial DNA from a donor, or the “third parent.”

The mitochondria are essential to almost every cell in our bodies, so diseases caused by mutations in mitochondrial DNA can be extremely debilitating, with symptoms including seizures, developmental delays, blindness, and organ failure.

“The goal [of MRT] is very simple: It’s to prevent the birth of children who would be wheelchair-bound and oxygen-starved and are doomed to a slow, painful death, and whose parents must be going through hell,” said Eli Adashi, a professor at Brown University who specializes in reproductive biology. “It’s not that complicated.”

But when it comes to defining and regulating MRT, there’s considerable disagreement. Is it just another form of in vitro fertilization, or is it an early form of gene editing that could quickly lead to riskier attempts at human enhancement?

In 2015, the United Kingdom became the first (and so far only) country to officially legalize the procedure, strictly to prevent genetic disease. And this February, doctors at the Newcastle Fertility Centre in the UK performed the therapy on two mothers. Australia and Singapore are currently considering whether to follow the UK’s lead and permit the procedure.

In the US, research on the experimental procedure has been banned since 2015 due to a rider that was furtively added to an appropriations bill. The ban has been baffling to scientists, most of whom consider the procedure worth studying.

Yet it hasn’t stopped one US doctor, John Zhang, who runs a fertility clinic in New York City, from performing MRT in Mexico for a couple. And a clinic in Ukraine is partnering with Zhang’s clinic to offer this procedure to Americans who can afford the $15,000 fee.

MRT has garnered its fair share of criticism, given that it involves manipulating an embryo, which changes the genes of future generations of humans. And so far, only a handful of babies have been born using MRT over the past two years, which means we don’t yet know if there will be any long-term effects on them.

But since MRT is not so far removed from other fertility treatments, some scientists believe that it simply needs more research and proper regulation to become commonplace, perhaps even an IVF option for lesbian couples who want to have children genetically related to both of them.

With gene therapy and gene editing technologies like CRISPR giving us increasing power to change the DNA of future generations of humans, the story of MRT shows us the kinds of conversations we need to have surrounding these ethically tricky therapies.

So how does it work? Should we be scared of it? And why did it get banned in the US? Here’s what we know.

Mitochondrial DNA, explained

You may recall that the mitochondria are called the “powerhouse” of the cell. That’s because they float around in all our cells with the main function of producing high-energy molecules (called ATP) that fuel most processes in our bodies. But mitochondria are especially interesting because they have their own DNA.

About 99.9 percent of our DNA is housed in the cell nucleus as chromosomes. That extra 0.1 percent is located — you guessed it — in our mitochondria.

When eggs are fertilized by sperm, you get a nucleus with DNA that’s half from the mom and half from the dad. But the sperm’s mitochondria don’t enter the egg, so the new baby cell only gets the mom’s mitochondrial DNA. In other words, our mitochondrial DNA is only passed from mother to child, a pattern known as “maternal inheritance.”

The inheritance of mitochondrial DNA is not as well-studied as the inheritance of DNA from the nucleus, or nuclear DNA, but we do know that if a mother has certain mutations in her mitochondrial DNA, it increases the risk of a child having severe disease.

From three people to one embryo

So how does mitochondrial replacement therapy work? To be clear, it is not exactly gene editing because doctors are replacing DNA that lies outside the nucleus. Instead, it falls under the umbrella of genetic manipulation.

While the nucleus of one of our cells contains about 30,000 genes, our mitochondria contain just 37 genes. These genes only code for proteins involved in making ATP, the molecule that provides energy for most of our cellular processes.

Just like our other DNA, our mitochondrial DNA can mutate, leading to the production of faulty proteins. Those faulty proteins can cause neurological diseases like Leigh syndrome, which is caused by damaged brain tissue, and MERRF, which results from abnormal muscle and nerve cells.

These diseases are pretty rare. An estimated one in 5,000 people have mitochondrial diseases stemming from both nuclear and mitochondrial DNA mutations, with nuclear DNA mutation as the larger contributor. Using data from 2012, researchers at Newcastle University estimated that about 778 births per year in the US are at risk for inheriting diseases due to mitochondria DNA mutations.

Mitochondrial replacement therapy offers a solution for mothers who may not want to pass down their mitochondrial DNA. Instead, a female donor’s mitochondria are used. So even though the popular phrase used to describe the treatment is “three-parent baby,” the resulting embryo only has a tiny bit of DNA from the donor. A child born from MRT has 99.9 percent of its DNA from its two parents.

There are a few ways of transferring mitochondria, but the two most common methods of doing MRT are pronuclear transfer and spindle transfer. It gets a bit complicated here.

In pronuclear transfer, both the maternal eggs and the donor eggs are fertilized via IVF. The fertilized nucleus (known as the pronucleus) of the donor egg is destroyed and replaced with the fertilized nucleus of the maternal egg, which has the DNA of the mother and the father.

In spindle transfer, the nuclear DNA from the mother (known as a spindle) is transplanted into the donor’s egg, replacing the donor’s DNA. This new egg is fertilized by the father’s sperm via intracytoplasmic sperm injection, a technique that’s similar to IVF, except the sperm is directly injected into an egg rather than entering the cell on its own in a petri dish.

Pronuclear transfer is the easier and cheaper method since the pronucleus is larger and easier to image and transfer than the spindle. But it also poses some moral and religious questions because it involves the destruction of fertilized nuclei, which some may consider akin to abortion (all the donors’ nuclei are fertilized and replaced).

Scientists at the Newcastle Fertility Centre use pronuclear transfer, while Zhang’s clinic uses spindle transfer.

The UK hospital has been pretty quiet about the procedure — the press office told Vox that it could not grant interviews yet — but the Guardian has reported that it’s done the procedure on two women.

Why MRT is banned in the US

Today, it’s illegal to perform MRT in the US, while the UK is at the forefront. But most of the research behind MRT — and the first baby born using the technique — was a result of the work of American scientists and doctors.

In 2009, researchers at the Oregon National Primate Research Center successfully performed MRT in a Rhesus macaque monkey. Follow-up studies like this one and this one concluded that MRT had the potential to be performed in humans.

Taking this data into consideration, the Food and Drug Administration’s Cellular, Tissue, and Gene Therapies Advisory Committee held a meeting in 2014 and concluded that more research was needed before it could be legalized.

Then in 2015, the FDA requested that a committee from the National Academy of Sciences review the procedure, and the committee published a report essentially saying that with oversight, MRT could be justified.

Progress came to a halt when Congress passed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016. Among other things, the bill included a rider that banned germline modifications. This term encompasses all genetic engineering on eggs, sperm, or early embryos — modifications that would be passed down beyond a single generation.

This law is why editing the genes of embryos is illegal, and it was likely included in the act because of increasing concerns over the ability of technology like CRISPR to one day allow us to engineer “designer babies.”

But there’s a big difference here: MRT gives us significantly less control than CRISPR over an embryo’s genes because the mitochondria only hold about 0.1 percent of our DNA. Yet since MRT involves changing the DNA in an egg, the rider also made MRT illegal. It’s unclear which Congress members included this rider, but it has been renewed every time and remains in the 2018 iteration of the act.

Jeffrey Kahn, director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, was the chair of the committee at the National Academy that reviewed MRT before the 2016 act was passed. He was in charge of the report that justified MRT. “The week that we delivered our report to the FDA … the budget bill got passed,” he said. “The general counsel said the recommendations that we made would violate the prohibition.”

For now, women in the US with mitochondrial mutations don’t have any domestic options to prevent passing the mutations down if they want to be genetically related to their child. To get around the restrictions, Dr. Zhang took a couple to Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2016 to perform MRT for them. And then he got a letter from the FDA notifying him that he was breaking the law.

So while MRT has now become popular in the UK, its application in the US is still up in the air.

“[MRT] can technically be construed as germline modification, so mitochondrial replacement got swept up into that rider,” said Brown University’s Adashi. “It was caught up in the gene editing concerns, and I think it’s sort of an unfortunate linkage.”

“It was really an American idea,” he continued. “Which makes it all the more unfortunate that it has been restricted here.”

The big ethical question

Germline modifications — or changes to DNA in eggs, sperm, or early embryos — are controversial because they can theoretically involve altering future generations of humans. Especially in situations where regulations are minimal — or nonexistent, such as in Ukraine — giving scientists the ability to change the germline can be dangerous.

CRISPR, a powerful method of gene editing, was used to modify an embryo in 2017. In response, scientists published a statement in Cell, essentially saying that while research on genetic modification shouldn’t be prohibited, it should have proper oversight. These debates are important because we should be aware of the power of our science.

“Obviously, there are ethical considerations,” Adashi said. “Everybody’s always concerned about state-led eugenics, knowing what happened in World War II.”

Eugenics is the idea that humans can be selectively bred to create a perfect species. It reached an infamous nadir with the Nazi movement to create an “Aryan race” by wiping out people with undesired traits. It has a pretty dark history in the US as well.

But going from MRT to eugenics is a bit of a leap, particularly because the mitochondria only have 37 genes, which mostly lead to proteins specifically involved with metabolism.

“One has to be open to all possibilities, but it just seems rather far-fetched,” Adashi said. “That’s not to say you shouldn’t think about it; I just find it really a stretch to think something like eugenics will come from this.”

Most scientists agree that genetic modification makes sense to prevents certain heritable diseases from being passed down. As Kahn puts it, they don’t believe the germline is “inherently inviolable.”

“If the safety and uncertainty and precision concerns can be addressed, then germline modifications can be admissible and even preferable,” he continued. “Especially for diseases like Huntington’s, which is very, very heritable.”

In 2014, Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the Center for Genetics and Society, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times explaining why MRT shouldn’t become legal. She noted that more than the scientific considerations, it’s the ethical issues that are more worrisome. Why should a woman undergo this experimental therapy, when safer alternatives such as in vitro fertilization or adoption exist?

“Simply being able to do something doesn’t mean we should do it,” she wrote.

But while the US banned it, lawmakers in the UK had a different approach to addressing the ethical concerns behind MRT. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) — a branch of the UK’s Department of Health that specifically regulates fertility treatment and research — assembled a committee to review the scientific evidence backing up MRT. They incorporated public opinion and held debates in Parliament. In 2015, the HFEA permitted “cautious use of mitochondrial donation in treatment.”

Each patient in the UK who undergoes MRT must get a license from the HFEA. And there are strict guidelines for which women are allowed to have MRT: There must both be a risk of “mitochondrial abnormalities caused by mitochondrial DNA” in the egg and “a significant risk that a person with those abnormalities will have or develop a serious mitochondrial disease.”

Adashi considers the UK’s method for licensing MRT the gold standard of how to adjudicate difficult ethical questions.

“Britain has always been more pragmatic, more secular, less preoccupied with some of the things that we tend to place a great deal of value into,” he said. “We’re the last Western nation preoccupied with the ‘pro-life/pro-choice’ issue.”

Darnovsky and the FDA consider MRT to be similar to embryo editing via CRISPR — a change to the human germline, and therefore worthy of concern. But scientists in favor of MRT and the HFEA believe it to be more like in vitro fertilization, a fertility treatment that does not change the nuclear DNA. Turns out this difference in definition is the key to whether it’s accepted.

The future of MRT in the US

Adashi calls mitochondrial DNA “sort of a Wild West” in the study of heredity because there’s a lot about it that we still don’t know.

For example, we’re not certain why the DNA in our mitochondria typically mutates at a much lower rate than our other DNA. We also don’t really know how mitochondrial disease gets passed from mother to child; at this point, it seems random.

More importantly, as it pertains to the outcomes of MRT, what could happen to a child who has donor mitochondrial DNA that comes from a different source than nuclear DNA? Since mitochondrial replacement has only happened over the past few years, we don’t know the long-term effects yet.

But in order for this research to be done, the rider needs to be changed, since it currently prohibits anyone from even applying to the FDA to research MRT in humans.

“People are not going to be doing a ton of research if there’s not a pathway to humans,” Kahn said. “But there is interest in going forward; all it requires is someone taking [the ban] out.”

Earlier this year, Adashi co-authored a paper in Obstetrics and Gynecology explaining his belief that the ban on MRT research should be removed.

Most scientists don’t want rampant and unregulated MRT on the table. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Scientists want regulations to be eased so that more research can be done on these unanswered questions about MRT; so that it can be carried out safely for those who really need it.

“Humanity has always needed time to get over scientific breakthroughs,” said Adashi. “The fear about revising the laws of nature, altering the natural order — it’s resistant to cerebral arguments. It generally takes a generation or so to convince people that it’s okay.”

]]> Radhika Viswanathan <![CDATA[Overfishing is decimating sharks. This map shows where they cross paths with fishing boats.]]> https://www.vox.com/2018/7/26/17607842/shark-week-2018-map-fishing-boats 2018-07-26T11:46:29-04:00 2018-07-26T08:50:01-04:00 Jaws. Sharknado. Megalodon. Our obsession with sharks peaks every year with nothing less than a week-long immersion into frightening, funny, and outright fin-sane (sorry) television devoted to the apex predators of the ocean.

That’s right, it’s Discovery’s Shark Week.

Launched in 1988, the week of shark-related programming on the Discovery Channel has now become a cultural phenomenon in America. In 2015, the shows had an average viewership of 1.27 million people, and last year’s episode featuring Michael Phelps racing a (CGI) great white shark drew in a record 5 million viewers. President Donald Trump even asked Stormy Daniels to watch a Shark Week documentary with him during their now-famous 2007 meeting.

This year, the programming includes basketball star Shaquille O’Neal getting over a fear of sharks, the Shark Tank team deciding on a conservation group to invest in, and a special episode of Naked and Afraid called Naked and Afraid of Sharks.

But environmentalists have a love-hate relationship with Shark Week. On the one hand, it has led to the spread of misinformation about the massive fish, elevating the myth that they are dangerous and man-eating. NPR reported that in 2013, Shark Week led to an increase in demand for shark meat.

On the other hand, Shark Week gives activists a powerful excuse to raise awareness about shark conservation.

The fossil record shows that sharks have been around for more than 400 million years, which means they have outlived dinosaurs. Yet they are now increasingly threatened, with 10 shark species (out of 1,000 total species of sharks and rays) critically endangered.

That’s because while sharks may be at the top of the food chain in the ocean, they’ve got nothing on humans and our taste for shark fin soup (yes, we are the worst).

Overfishing and a lack of regulation is by far the biggest threat to shark populations, according to WWF. A study conducted in 2013 calculated that about 97 million sharks (or about 7 percent of sharks) were caught by fishermen and killed in 2010.

This year, the conservation group Oceana has created an interactive map that overlays the movement of tagged sharks with commercial fishing activity. The result: a beautiful multicolored visual that allows users to observe where sharks and fishing intersect in the Atlantic Ocean.

The map was created with the help of Dr. Austin Gallagher of Beneath the Waves, a nonprofit research group that specializes in shark conservation, and Dr. Neil Hammerschlag, a research associate professor at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.

Between 2012 and 2018, they tagged 45 sharks along the East Coast of the US. Tracking a wide range of species — blue shark, tiger shark, shortfin mako, great hammerhead, scalloped hammerhead, porbeagle, and dusky shark — the researchers sought to visualize all the human infrastructure that sharks must navigate. The path of each tracked shark is overlaid on a map created by Global Fishing Watch, a nonprofit organization that tracks fishing activity to help regulate marine resources.

The shark tracking is limited to the western part of the Atlantic Ocean, so it does not cover the area where most sharks are caught (25 percent of captured sharks are caught in Indonesia, India, and Pakistan). Nonetheless, here are some cool things you can see on the map.

The movement of 45 sharks over the past six years

At the top of the food chain, sharks are essential to maintaining the balance of their ecosystems; they keep other species from overpopulating and are able to eat a variety of prey. Therefore, having a healthy shark population is a pretty good indicator of how healthy your overall ecosystem is.

The map shows the 45 tagged sharks, which cumulatively have covered 150,000 miles in the six years they’ve been tracked. One of the sharks, an adult male shortfin mako named Oscar, traveled more than 22,000 miles in less than two years. Here’s his path (in pink):

Another shark, an adult male blue shark named Buzz, traveled the farthest south of the tracked sharks. His journey (in pink) from Cape Cod to South America was more than 3,000 miles. The blue shark is highly migratory and tends to move toward the north Atlantic during the summer months and toward the south Atlantic during the winter. But Buzz’s trip is surprising because rising ocean temperatures have contributed to fewer sharks migrating south.

The movement of commercial fishing boats

You can also select commercial fishing (in blue), and see how this human activity overlaps with shark movement. Fishing has been more detrimental to shark populations than just about anything else.

Take some time to play around on the map on your own. You can filter for marine protected areas, filter for where fishing is restricted, analyze fishing in Indonesia, and change the colors. And if you press the “play” button on the lower left corner, you can track the sharks moving through the ocean over the past six years. Happy Shark Week!

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]]> Radhika Viswanathan <![CDATA[The rescue of the 12 Thai boys who were trapped in a cave, explained]]> https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/7/5/17532464/thai-soccer-team-cave-rescue-diving-monsoon 2018-07-19T12:46:11-04:00 2018-07-19T12:36:31-04:00
Onlookers cheer as ambulances transported the last boys and their coach from a helipad to Chiangrai Prachanukroh Hospital on July 10 in Chiang Rai, Thailand. | Getty Images

The rescue mission to save 12 Thai boys and their soccer coach who’ve been trapped in a cave in northern Thailand is complete with all 12 boys and their coach rescued and returning home.

“We are not sure if this is a miracle, a science, or what. All the thirteen Wild Boars are now out of the cave,” the Thai Navy SEALs said on their Facebook page on July 10.

On July 18 — almost a month after they entered the cave and were trapped by the rain — they were released from the hospital and have been cleared to return to their families. The boys also addressed the public for the first time at a press conference, and talked about what they had learned from the ordeal; one boy said he would be “more careful and live my life the fullest.” Another said, “This experience taught me to be more patient and strong.”

The 12 boys and the coach were found trapped in the flooded Tham Luang Nang Non cave system a half a mile below the surface by two British divers on July 2. The soccer team, known as the Wild Boars, had been missing since June 23, when heavy monsoon rains flooded the cave and trapped them in a chamber some 2.5 miles from the cave’s mouth.

The mission to rescue them was an extraordinary international operation with hundreds of cave and rescue experts and military personnel from several different countries, including the United States, pitching in. Rescue divers first delivered food and medical supplies, and then an air tube to the boys to make sure they had enough oxygen to breathe. They then escorted them out of the cave on stretchers guided by expert divers, one by one.

“The operation went much better than expected,” Chiang Rai acting Gov. Narongsak Osatanakorn said, according to the Associated Press.

The initial rescue plan was to wait out the monsoon season, or at least to wait until the boys regained strength. But the threat of more rain loomed, and the situation became more dire. Oxygen levels in the cave had dropped to levels that could become dangerous. And the rescue team had a fatality Friday in 38-year-old volunteer Saman Kunan, who lost consciousness as he was bringing oxygen tanks into the cave because he ran out of air underwater.

After the operation to bring them out of the cave began on Sunday, the boys were rescued in three waves: four on Sunday, four on Monday, and four plus their coach on Tuesday.

How did the Thai boys get in the cave?

It was Saturday, June 23. The team of 12 boys — who were all between the ages of 11 and 16 and nicknamed the Wild Boars — had just finished a weekly soccer practice and went to explore the cave with their coach. According to the Wall Street Journal, they had been inside the cave before; this time, they wanted to go further in to write their names on the wall as part of an initiation.

But after they’d entered the cave, heavy rain started falling and the rising water trapped them inside.

The boys tried to dig their way out. With no food and water, they began licking the condensed water on the sides of the cave walls to stay hydrated. And their coach, Ekapol Chantawong, who had trained in a Buddhist monastery, led the boys through meditation sessions to help them stay calm.

“I had no strength at all,” said 11-year-old Chanin Wibulroongreung at the press conference on July 18. “I didn’t think about food because it only made me hungrier.”

As Richard C. Paddock and Muktita Suhartono of the New York Times reported, at first, the governor of Chiang Rai province, where the cave is located, thought a rescue would be “impossible.”

But the effort swiftly became an international collaboration. The US sent 30 people, including 17 members of the Air Force. Rescuers joined from Australia, Japan, China, Myanmar, and Laos. The British Cave Rescue Council headed the cave exploration that eventually found them.

One of the divers on the search team, Ben Reymenants, spoke to Vox about what it was like trying to find the boys:

When I arrived, the entrance looked like the Colorado River, but with mud and with zero visibility, so it was really pulling hand over hand. 

There was this really strong outflow, and at the beginning we were advancing about maybe 100 meters a day in zero visibility, fighting the current. And then there are parts where you have to climb up, dragging all your tanks.

I turned around from one unsuccessful dive, and I took out my line and came back and I met the British who were on their way in. And then we decided, “We have to call it off, because it’s not going to happen. People will die, and we don’t even know if these kids are alive.”

When the divers found the missing boys and the coach, they were huddled on a rock above the water, smiling but emaciated.

Footage of that moment — published on the Thai Navy SEALs’ Facebook page — has nearly 26 million views. Over muffled audio, you can hear one of the rescuers telling the boys, “You have been here 10 days. 10 days. You are very strong, very strong.”

The video made a celebrity out of one of the boys: 14-year-old Adul Sam-on, a stateless refugee from Myanmar who could speak English and helped communicate with the divers.

The story struck a happy chord around the world. People from all over tweeted out their excitement upon hearing of the rescue.

The days leading to the rescue

The mission: navigate 12 boys without cave diving experience through 2.5 miles of flooded and narrow passageways. For days, it seemed an impossible task.

As oxygen levels dropped and the risk of more rainfall increased, the Royal Thai Navy realized that it needed to act quickly.

“At first we thought we could sustain the kids’ lives for a long time where they are now, but now many things have changed,” Thai Navy SEAL Rear Adm. Arpakorn Yookongkaew said on Friday. “We have a limited amount of time.”

The rescuers had been juggling four options: pumping out the water flooding the cave, teaching the boys to swim, finding or drilling an alternative entrance, or waiting out the monsoon.

It took the experienced divers five hours to make the journey out of the cave due to high currents, poor visibility, and narrow, muddy paths, and many were unsure if the boys could take on this gargantuan challenge.

Edd Sorenson, a member of the National Speleological Society-Cave Diving Section, told Vox that dry rescues like this one — where the trapped people are not fully submerged — are usually safer than wet rescues. But this rescue has been complicated by the flooding.

“Water can be very violent, and this is a very difficult [cave rescue] because of the extreme high flow, the zero visibility, the boulder pile chokes, restrictions,” he said.

The Navy, as well as a Special Response Team from Australia, had been bringing in food, water, medicine, and diving equipment into the cave. To raise oxygen levels, they ran air pipe from the rescue base inside the cave to the chamber where the boys and the coach are waiting to be rescued.

The rescue team also worked round the clock over the past week to pump about 40 percent of the water out of the cave — so much water that nearby farmers’ fields got flooded. Despite their ruined fields, some farmers said they were glad to be part of the mission: “With the farming, we can make money again. But 13 lives are not something we can create,” one told the Straits Times.

Soccer stars provided moral support too: Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima and Christian Fuchs sent messages to the team. Elon Musk tweeted Saturday that his SpaceX his engineers were working on a “tiny, kid-size submarine” that might be useful in the rescue.

How were the boys rescued?

On Tuesday, the Thai Navy SEALs updated their Facebook page with a joyful message: “We are not sure if this is a miracle, a science, or what. All the thirteen Wild Boars are now out of the cave.”

Rescuers initially said they were going to teach the boys to swim out of the flooded cave accompanied by expert divers. But on Wednesday afternoon, a day after the mission was completed, the Thai Navy SEALs posted a video to Facebook that suggests the boys did not swim, but instead were given full-face masks, put on stretchers, and guided through the passageways by the divers:

The Thai prime minister also said on Tuesday the boys were given an anti-anxiety medication as part of the rescue. And since the medic in the cave, Richard Harris, was an anesthetist, he may have overseen that part of the rescue effort.

A former Thai Navy SEAL involved with the operation, Commander Chaiyananta Peeranarong, told AFP on Wednesday that the boys were “sleeping or partially-conscious as they were passed from diver-to-diver through the cave.”

“Some of them were asleep, some of them were wiggling their fingers… (as if) groggy, but they were breathing,” he said.

There are conflicting reports of how much and what kind of medication given to the boys to keep them calm or knock them out for the operation. CBS reported that the boys were given only anti-anxiety medication, but AFP’s source said some of the boys were fully sedated.

One reason the narrative of the rescue mission has changed is that rescuers seemed to have changed the plan, but were instructed not to give out information to the media while the risky rescue was still underway.

After the near-perfect rescue, the boys were quarantined for a week at the Chiang Rai Prachanukroh hospital to make sure that they hadn’t caught any transmissible diseases from their time in the cave. A doctor at the press conference said that they were ready to return to their families and readjust to everyday life. 

And during the press conference, the coach thanked Kunan, the Thai Navy SEAL who died while delivering oxygen tanks into the cave during the rescue: “We are impressed that Saman sacrificed his life to save us so that we could go and live our lives. Once we heard the news, we were shocked. We were very sad. We felt like … we caused sadness to his family.”

The boys will likely be ordained as Buddhist monks for a short time; according to the BBC, it’s a common practice for Thai men and boys who undergo traumatic events.

Clarification: An earlier version of this piece said that the boys swam out of the cave with the help of expert divers. New information that became available Wednesday revealed that in fact they were given an anti-anxiety medication or sedative and wrapped on stretchers as the expert divers ferried them through the cave system.

]]> Radhika Viswanathan <![CDATA[Thai boys speak publicly for the first time: “This experience taught me to be more patient”]]> https://www.vox.com/2018/7/18/17585868/thai-cave-rescue-press-conference 2018-07-18T13:31:53-04:00 2018-07-18T13:20:02-04:00

The 12 Thai boys and their soccer coach who were rescued from a cave last week have been released from the hospital, and they addressed the public during a Wednesday press conference.

Smiling and dressed in matching soccer uniforms, the boys, all between 11 and 16 years old, reported details of their time in the cave. They described that they tried to keep their mind off food and licked the water dripping from the side of the cave walls for sustenance.

“I had no strength at all,” said 11-year-old Chanin Wibulroongreung. “I didn’t think about food because it only made me hungrier.”

They also revealed some details about their ordeal that had not been previously reported. For example, they said that before they were found, they had tried to dig their way out. Some boys also said that they hadn’t told their parents they were going into the cave because they were afraid of being forbidden to join the excursion.

The boys also talked about how they kept up their spirits playing checkers with members of the Thai Navy SEALs while waiting to be rescued.

“[Navy SEAL] Baitoey always won and he was the king of cave,” one of the boys said, according to the BBC.

The questions asked were limited and had been screened by a psychiatrist to ensure that they wouldn’t be too taxing on the boys. And the BBC reported that according to the Chiang Rai provincial governor, this would be their only media session.

According to the New York Times, the boys apologized to their families for sneaking off into the caves, which is known to be very dangerous during the monsoon season:

They wanted to say that they were very, very sorry.

They had not told their parents they would be visiting the cave, a favored spot for exploration, they said. Instead, their families were under the impression the teammates were only going out to practice soccer.

One boy said he hadn’t informed his parents he was going to Tham Luang because he was sure he wouldn’t be given permission.

“I would like to apologize to Dad and Mom,” said Phanumas Saengdee, 13, who recounted how he had secretly put a flashlight for a cave adventure in his soccer bag.

The coach, Ekapol Chantawong, 25, said that they tried to dig tunnels out of the cave once it had gotten flooded. Chantawong was found the weakest because he had given all his food to the boys. Having trained in a Buddhist monastery, he also led the boys through meditation sessions while they were trapped in the cave.

During the press conference, Chantawong also thanked Saman Kunan, the Thai Navy SEAL who died while delivering oxygen tanks into the cave during the rescue: “We are impressed that Saman sacrificed his life to save us so that we could go and live our lives. Once we heard the news, we were shocked. We were very sad. We felt like … we caused sadness to his family.”

The boys will likely be ordained as monks for a short time; according to the BBC, that is a common practice for Thai men and boys who undergo traumatic events.

All last week, the world watched as the soccer team, known as the Wild Boars, were brought out of a partially flooded cave system in northern Thailand. Each boy was carried out on a stretcher by an international team of divers and Thai Navy SEAL members.

The boys had been missing for nine days, and finding them had seemed impossible. But on July 2, they were found by two British divers on the search team. The video of the initial discovery made a celebrity out of one of the boys: 14-year-old Adul Sam-on, a stateless refugee from Myanmar who could speak English and helped communicate with the divers.

After the near-perfect rescue, the boys were quarantined for a week at the Chiang Rai Prachanukroh hospital to confirm that they hadn’t caught any transmissible diseases from their time in the cave. A doctor at the press conference said that they were mentally ready to return to their families and readjust to everyday life. 

The BBC reported some of the lessons the boys said they learned from the ordeal: One boy said he would be “more careful and live my life the fullest.” Another said, “This experience taught me to be more patient and strong.”

]]> Radhika Viswanathan <![CDATA[“This is madness”: A rescue diver on what it was like to save the Thai boys in the cave]]> https://www.vox.com/2018/7/12/17564360/thai-cave-rescue-boys-mission-diver-ben-reymenants 2018-07-13T23:16:03-04:00 2018-07-12T16:30:01-04:00
Ben Reymenants, 45, is a professional diver originally from Belgium who helped find the boys and lay the groundwork for their rescue. | Ben Reymenants via Facebook

The story of the 12 Thai soccer players and their coach who had to be rescued from a flooded cave in northern Thailand by more than a dozen international divers and Thai Navy SEALs has enthralled the world for the past 10 days.

Though a mission to bring them out through the cave at first seemed impossible, rescuers eventually came up with a scheme that involved fitting the boys with dive masks, and wrapping them on stretchers to transport them out of the cave safely.

“We are not sure if this is a miracle, a science, or what. All the thirteen Wild Boars are now out of the cave,” the Thai Navy SEALs said on their Facebook page on Tuesday after the mission was complete. The boys are currently in recovery at the Chiang Rai Prachanukroh hospital, where some are being treated for mild pneumonia.

The initial search mission to find the boys after they went missing on June 23 was almost called off because the flooded cave was so dangerous to navigate. But then the boys and their coach were found on July 2 some 2.5 miles from the cave’s mouth by a pair of British divers.

The larger search team consisted of Thai Navy SEALs and several international divers, including Ben Reymenants, 45, a Belgian who owns a diving company in Phuket, Thailand.

Reymenants’s search dives helped lay the groundwork for the rescue, and he assisted the Thai officials in charge of the mission through its end. Vox spoke to him about what it was like in the watery labyrinth with 13 lives at stake.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Radhika Viswanathan

When did you get called in to help look for the missing boys, and can you describe the first few days of the search?

Ben Reymenants

We saw on the news that the kids were missing, and then I saw that the British cave rescue group had already come to the site, so I’m like, “Okay, these guys are experienced, they’re in good hands.”

But they were helped by the Royal Thai Navy SEALs, who had less cave experience. So a friend of mine who deals with these guys says, “Hey, they’re going to need support. Can you please come over and advise these guys how to actually move through these caves and fix the lines?”

Of course, I didn’t think twice. Twelve boys with their whole lives in front of them. But then when I arrived, the British cave divers had just come out the cave and they were like, “This is madness.”

Radhika Viswanathan

Why?

Ben Reymenants

When I arrived, the entrance looked like the Colorado River, but with mud and with zero visibility, so it was really pulling hand over hand.

There was this really strong outflow, and at the beginning we were advancing about maybe 100 meters a day in zero visibility, fighting the current. And then there are parts where you have to climb up, dragging all your tanks.

I turned around from one unsuccessful dive, and I took out my line and came back and I met the British who were on their way in. And then we decided, “We have to call it off, because it’s not going to happen. People will die, and we don’t even know if these kids are alive.”

We told the Navy commander. And he says, “Yes, but these are kids from Thailand. I can’t face the public and say ‘we’re calling it off.’”

So he said, “I’m going to send in my Navy SEALs and we’re going to try.”

These were 19-year-old SEALs … I could be their dad. So I’m like, “Okay, the least I can do is help them try.”

Then on the third day, the [visibility improved] and the current was less strong. The Navy SEALs had come back unsuccessfully; they had swum in circles and couldn’t find the passage. The British cave divers had already said, “We’re going home.”

I managed to push 200 meters of line. And they said, “Let’s work in teams, laying line.” While one team was sleeping, the other continued, so round-the-clock. And we started advancing fast because the rain had stopped, the vis got better, the flow got less, and then we actually went really fast through the cave.

These were still dives of six to eight hours. Very, very tiring.

Radhika Viswanathan

So how was it actually finding them?

Ben Reymenants

The difficult part was to find this T-junction [a narrow part of the cave with a very sharp turn, beyond which was the tunnel that eventually led to the boys]. We got stuck a few times, we freaked out.

And then [our team] found the T-junction, laid another 400 meters of line in the right direction, and then I think we stopped literally not even half a kilometer from the room where we thought they were, and we ran out of line.

So we had to turn around. It was very frustrating.

When we came out, the British cave divers were just coming in, and we were like, “You probably can find them. We think it’s just another 400 to 800 meters.” And so they went in right after us, and three hours later, they surfaced in the room where the kids were. You’ve probably seen the footage.

I couldn’t believe it. Especially that there were all 13, alive and nobody injured, and their mental status as well, they were all like, “Hey, oh, we’re so happy, What day is it?” Remarkable.

Radhika Viswanathan

So how did the decision-making process go for the rescue, to actually get them out of the cave?

Ben Reymenants

Obviously the whole world … had solutions; you have no idea the messages that I got. I pushed away a phone call, and they kept calling me and they said, “It’s the offices of Elon Musk,” and I said, “Right, is Barack Obama gonna call me next?” 

But they said, “No, check your email, it’s actually us,” and it was (someone)@spaceX and I said, “Oh shit, I’m so sorry.” And they said, “We have all these solutions.”

So they were actually trying at four different levels: they were trying drilling, they were trying sonar in the forest to find alternative entrances, they were making a capsule to get them out.

One of the [rescue team’s] options was actually to teach them how to dive. But this is already pretty hard for experienced cave divers. See, the risk is if the boys panic and they pull off the mask, they drown. It’s a mile in; there’s no chance for survival.

And they were so skinny and so weak, there was no way they could have walked over all of this. So we decided to put them on a stretcher, with a full face mask, with pure oxygen on a positive pressure.

And it was quite chilly, so although they were put in wetsuits, their metabolism was so low that they were half-asleep, half-unconscious when they were brought out. So they were put immediately in quarantine and medical care. [Some reports have also claimed that the kids were sedated for the journey.]

And they’re all in good health and it’s amazing. And what I heard was that the coach did long meditation sessions [before leaving the cave] so they could calm down.

Radhika Viswanathan

How did the divers maneuver the stretchers through the narrowest parts of the cave?

Ben Reymenants

The smallest space was actually 2 feet wide, so yes, it was quite high, 60 centimeters high. And these kids are quite skinny and strapped to a stretcher.

The kids had to be literally pulled and dragged through that part. That’s also why they decided to strap them in and cover their face with a full face mask, so just in case they would panic or whatever. It’s not easy.

I stayed outside of the cave [during the rescue], since I needed to heal my hands and back. But friends of mine, the cave divers, they basically literally pulled and dragged the stretchers and handed them over [to one another]. So 24 divers were actually in the cave, and the stretchers were pulled out one-by-one and handed over to the next group, and the next group.

It was still a good two hours per kid.

Radhika Viswanathan

How did it end up being so much shorter than the initial dives?

Ben Reymenants

By now, we knew the cave. In the beginning, we were literally looking and searching and fighting current. But now, with all the teams, by the time one team carried the stretcher about 100 meters, they got tired and could hand it over to the next team. So that’s why. It was very efficient.

Also from Camp 3, rock climbers had actually installed hooks in the roof and made a sort of cable zip line where you could attach the stretchers. It was initially installed there to haul more than 500 tanks into the cave. And the stretchers were clipped on there — they’re very light kids — and that made them come out very quickly. 

But it was still only four kids a day.

Radhika Viswanathan

How long have you been cave diving? And what drew you to it?

Ben Reymenants

I’ve been diving unofficially for about 20 years, and I became a cave instructor roughly 10 years ago. Not even 10 percent of the submerged caves on the planet have been explored. So it’s really the last frontier for mankind because no machines or animals can go in there. Only humans that are trained can go to that extent, which makes it extra special.

Radhika Viswanathan

How often do these kinds of cave rescues happen and how does this one compare to others?

Ben Reymenants

Luckily these cave rescues happen rarely because a lot of countries have actually put policies in place that prevent non-trained cave divers from going inside caves.

This cave … is only visited when it’s the dry season; when it’s completely dry, people walk in there. It’s a very long cave—it’s about [5.5 miles] long.

When it’s flooded, nobody dives. There are no lines. Normally, dive caves have a full set of lines and arrows to point to the exit and safety markers in place, but this one had nothing. So it was really finding your way through with a pretty basic map.

Radhika Viswanathan

I’ve heard this will be turned into two movies.

Ben Reymenants

Oh, you have no idea how many requests. Discovery, National Geographic.

]]> Radhika Viswanathan <![CDATA[Video: Thai boys didn’t swim out of the cave; they were rescued on stretchers]]> https://www.vox.com/2018/7/11/17561932/thai-cave-rescue-boys-stretcher 2018-08-02T10:33:35-04:00 2018-07-11T16:20:02-04:00

Now that the 12 Thai boys and their soccer coach are safely out of the cave where they were trapped for just over two weeks, we’re learning more details on how the rescue mission was carried out.

Up until Wednesday, Vox — and other news outlets — were reporting that the boys swam out of the cave, accompanied by professional divers. Over the weekend, rescue officials had been telling reporters that divers were teaching the boys to swim and to use diving equipment.

But on Wednesday afternoon, a day after the mission was completed, the Thai Navy SEALs posted a video to Facebook that suggests the boys did not swim, but instead were fitted with dive masks, and put on stretchers that were guided through the passageways by the divers:

The Thai prime minister also said on Tuesday the boys were given an anti-anxiety medication as part of the rescue.

A former Thai Navy SEAL involved with the operation, Commander Chaiyananta Peeranarong, told AFP on Wednesday that the boys were “sleeping or partially-conscious as they were passed from diver-to-diver through the cave.”

”Some of them were asleep, some of them were wiggling their fingers… [as if] groggy, but they were breathing,” Commander Chaiyananta Peeranarong said. “My job was to transfer them along,” he said. He added that the “boys were wrapped up in stretchers already when they were being transferred” while doctors posted along the 2.5-mile long escape route checked them along the way.

There are conflicting reports of how much and what kind of medication given to the boys to keep them calm or knock them out for the operation. CBS reported that the boys were given only anti-anxiety medication, but AFP’s source said some of the boys were fully sedated.

But Thai prime minister on Tuesday denied the fact that the boys had been completely sedated: “Who would chloroform them? If they’re chloroformed, how could they come out? It’s called anxiolytic — something to make them not excited, not stressed.”

The BBC also outlined the different reports on the extent to which the boys were medicated:

Sources in the rescue operation, including divers who took part, told the BBC that the boys were heavily sedated ahead of the rescue to prevent them panicking in the dark, narrow, underwater passageways.

They were then strapped to one of two rescue divers tasked with shepherding each boy through the underwater parts of the system, and bundled into stretchers to be carried through the dry parts.

There were conflicting reports in the hours after the rescue about the extent to which the boys had been medicated before they were brought out…

Several sources have since confirmed that the boys were only partially conscious as they were brought out.

One reason the narrative of the rescue mission has changed is that rescuers seemed to have changed the plan, but were told not to give out information while the risky rescue was still underway. A diver involved with the mission who asked not to be named told Vox on Monday he wouldn’t be able to give us details until the rescue was over. (Vox has still not been able to reach him.)

But the new information that emerged today has given us a better peek behind the watery curtain.

]]> Radhika Viswanathan <![CDATA[Elon Musk’s plan to bring a mini-submarine to rescue the Thai boys]]> https://www.vox.com/2018/7/10/17553820/elon-musk-thai-cave-rescue-submarine 2018-07-11T16:17:04-04:00 2018-07-11T16:16:58-04:00
When SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk continued tweeting about his sub even after the rescue mission was over, he got some pretty funny tweets in response. | Getty Images

The 12 Thai boys and their coach have been rescued from the cave in northern Thailand where they’d been stuck for more than two weeks.

The end of the rescue operation also brought an end to one creative scheme to save them: Elon Musk’s “kid size” submarine.

Let’s back up. To help out the rescue mission, Musk’s engineers from SpaceX and Tesla had built and tested a mini-submarine for the boys to get out of the cave because they were not swimmers. But rescuers ultimately decided to bring the boys of out of the cave on stretchers guided by professional divers. The sub was never used.

In tweets on Monday, the head of SpaceX and Tesla said he would leave the sub behind, as it “may be useful in the future.” A Boring Company spokesperson tells Vox that a SpaceX team met with Rear Admiral Apakorn Youkongpaew and members of the Royal Thai Navy in Chiang Rai on Wednesday and the mini-sub is now in their possession. 

The pod was described by Musk as “a tiny, kid-size submarine … Light enough to be carried by 2 divers, small enough to get through narrow gaps. Extremely robust.” The idea behind it was to rescue the kids without them needing to swim or use air tanks.

“Although [Musk’s] technology is good and sophisticated, it’s not practical for this mission,” one of the rescue operation coordinators told the Guardian.

Musk’s involvement with a rescue mission halfway around the world began Friday when the boys’ fate was still very uncertain. The SpaceX and Boring Company CEO tweeted that he would go to Thailand to help with the efforts. He was welcomed by the Royal Thai Navy, who said on their Facebook page that engineers from his companies could potentially help with “location tracking, water pumping or battery power.”

Since then, Musk has publicly brainstormed several … interesting ideas on Twitter.

His first plan was to create an “air tunnel underwater,” using a long tube and blowing it up with air so the boys could simply walk through. Next, his team was working on building an “inflatable tube with airlocks.”

He then moved on to the pod, which was made, in true Muskian fashion, from the transfer tube of SpaceX’s Falcon rocket.

They began testing the submarine on Sunday in an Los Angeles pool; Musk again provided us with updates via Twitter.

But when Musk continued tweeting about his sub even after the rescue mission was over, he got some pretty funny tweets in response:

Musk went into the cave himself; he posted a video on his Instagram, where we can see the near-absolute darkness in the cave, save a few flashlights.

Jerome Taylor of the AFP reported that a spokesperson for the Thai prime minister said he was “very touched that Mr. Musk had personally travelled to Chiang Rai province to offer assistance, especially with his ingenious solutions.”

After reports that his submarine was impractical, Musk defended himself via Twitter, posting emails of his correspondence with British diver Richard Stanton, who helped lead the rescue and was part of the original diving duo that found the boys:

Musk then argued that the technology and submarine design could still be used in the future to rescue people in other “dangerous environments,” and could “work as an escape pod in space.”

Elon Musk keeps getting involved in unfolding crises

This is not the first time Musk has offered assistance in a crisis.

Last year, after the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Maria left island-wide power outages in Puerto Rico, Musk announced that he would send Powerpacks, Tesla’s utility battery packs, to the island.

As of a few months ago, the company had sent 1,000 of their battery systems to 662 locations in Puerto Rico, and Electrek reported that the batteries powered a hospital, sewage treatment plant, and water pumping station.

On June 3, Musk vaguely tweeted that Tesla has “about 11,000 projects underway in Puerto Rico.” But that number is impossible to verify and the details of these projects are unclear.

Meanwhile, Musk has been criticized for underdelivering on certain products; for example, Tesla had production issues with its Model 3 car and missed several deadlines, causing its shares to drop by 6 percent. (Although the stock recovered when they met their production target in June, it has dropped again over the past week.)

In a New Yorker piece titled “Elon Musk Has Delivery Issues,” Jeffrey Rothfeder wrote: “In the auto industry, Musk’s production assertions are viewed as the manufacturing equivalent of vaporware — an advance that is promised but has very little chance of becoming a reality.”

But as the author of Musk’s biography, Ashlee Vance, told Vox, his ability to consider ideas that others might dismiss as “crazy” is part of why he has been so successful.

Tesla, for one, continues to push international initiatives. It plans to build a plant in Shanghai to produce 500,000 cars in a year, and has already built the world’s largest lithium ion battery in Australia.

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Musk left the mini-sub behind in the cave. A Boring Company spokesperson reached out to Vox to clarify that the Royal Thai Navy now has possession of it.

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