Al's Morning Meeting

There are no therapies -- no shots, no pills -- specifically marketed to treat food allergies, which appear to be on the rise in the United States. By one estimate, the rate has doubled in 20 years.

While doctors are exploring new remedies, unique ethical, business and safety barriers hinder their research, especially when children are involved. They also don't understand why food allergies are becoming more prevalent, though they have plenty of theories.

Take peanut allergies, which are among the most potent and deadly food allergies. Maybe children develop allergies by eating too many peanut products as infants, or through breast milk. Maybe roasted peanuts explain America's problem, because countries that fry or boil nuts have lower rates. Maybe the increase in peanut allergies reflects the increase in all allergies -- from pollen to pets to peanuts.

All of the explanations have flaws, said Dr. Scott Sicherer of the Jaffe Food Allergy Institute in New York's Mount Sinai School of Medicine. He supports the "hygiene" theory that Americans live such clean, antibiotic lives that their immune systems are finding something else to attack -- the proteins in certain foods.

The immune system gets "misdirected," Sicherer said. "It is not getting the practice that it needs to."

The compelling evidence is the lower allergy rate in undeveloped countries, where people's immune systems are busy fighting off bacteria, viruses, water contaminants and other pollutants.

If true, the hygiene theory presents a public health dilemma. America isn't going to revert to dirty conditions to prevent allergies. And yet food allergies present dangers, including anaphylactic shock, that kill as many as 150 to 200 people each year.

Roughly 4 million Americans have true food allergies, which involve the immune system's reaction to food proteins. Allergies are distinct from milder cases of food intolerance, which are often temporary.

The U.S. Food & Drug Administration has a compilation of information about food allergens on its Web site, and the National Institutes of Health has an entry on the topic in its online medical encyclopedia.

12,000 Lose FEMA Hotel Rooms Today

The Associated Press wire ran this story over the weekend:

Twelve thousand families left homeless by hurricanes Katrina and Rita will lose their federally funded hotel privileges Monday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced Saturday.

This will be the second wave of evacuees weaned off the federally sponsored hotel stays within two weeks. Last week, the occupants of roughly 4,500 rooms lost FEMA funding for failing to register with the agency.

FEMA said it would continue to pay for families in 5,000 hotel rooms across the country.

Of those departing on Monday, FEMA officials said 10,500 families, or 88 percent, have received rent-assistance checks from the agency, said Libby Turner, FEMA's transitional housing director. The cash can be used to pay for an apartment or to continue their hotel stays. It can also be put toward fixing their ruined homes.

Because they can continue to pay for the rooms themselves, the deadline is not "the equivalent of an eviction," she said. "This is just about the billing of the room -- it will no longer be billed to FEMA."

Yet 1,100 families living in the subsidized hotel rooms are not eligible for further assistance from FEMA. Turner said those evacuees have been referred to other charitable programs.

Metals Thefts Threaten Public Safety

The Wichita Eagle reported:

Amid rising thefts of metal and increased police enforcement, Westar Energy acknowledged Thursday that thieves have snipped ground wires from 2,500 utility poles in the Wichita area.

 

The theft of ground wires isn't just costly. It also poses a public safety hazard, said Westar spokeswoman Karla Olsen. [...]

The thieves are cutting the most accessible portion of ground wire, generally a 5- to 6-foot section at each pole.

There have been no injuries caused by missing ground wire, but it poses a potential risk of shock or electrocution to workers maintaining the poles or anyone who comes into contact with a pole, Olsen said. The wires are designed to safely divert power to the earth.

Blogging Down 

A new Gallup poll says the average American could not give a continential hoot about online blogs.

The audience for Web logs, or "blogs" had an auspicious start, going from practically zero to almost 20 in a very short time frame (20 being the percentage of Americans today who report reading blogs on at least an occasional basis). However, according to recent Gallup data, it seems the growth in the number of U.S. blog readers was somewhere between nil and negative in the past year.

Gallup's annual Lifestyle survey, conducted Dec. 5 [through] 8, 2005, finds only 9 percent of Internet users saying they frequently read blogs, another 11 percent read them occasionally, 13 percent say they rarely read them, while 66 percent never read them.

These findings conform almost perfectly with a special Gallup study of blog use conducted in February 2005. At that time, 9 percent of Web users said they read blogs daily or a few times a week ("frequently"), 10 percent read them a few times a month ("occasionally"), 13 percent read them less often than monthly ("rarely"), and 63 percent never read them.

The Gallup Organization

Given the different response options used in the two questions, the December 2005 and February 2005 data are not exactly comparable. But, given the close similarities, it is reasonable to draw some inferences. The main inference is that blog readership did not grow during 2005.

Hundreds of Journalists' Blogs

The Online News Association has a list of hundreds of journalism-related blogs.
 

Newspaper TV

I know a lot of you are looking for new ways to create material for your online sites. Take a look at HamptonRoads.tv, which is a video site from The Virginian-Pilot. I suspect you will see a lot more newspapers moving in this direction in 2006.

Interesting that newspapers are working so hard to get video and audio online while TV stations, which have tons of video, and radio stations, which have hours of audio, still tend to lag behind in Web site content.