“[The bushmeat trade is] being made possible by the foreign logging companies going in and opening up the last remaining forests with roads. Hunters can now go deep into the forest where they couldn’t get before,” she said in an interview with the Canadian Press.

The hunters are taking all species available, from rodents to chimpanzees, and in record numbers.

But chimps aren’t the only primates in danger. Many diseases in the deep central African rainforest could easily transfer to humans.

According to Johannes Refisch from the University of Bayreuth and the Thai Monkey Project, a little known fact about AIDS is that it crossed from apes to humans not once, but at least seven times.

“There seems to be no doubt that the virus has been transmitted from manga-beys to humans at least six times, independently of each other, whereas the virus was transmitted from chimpanzees to humans only once,” he wrote in a report in the Gorilla Journal.

The jumps could have happened when the bodily fluids of freshly killed apes mixed with those of the hunters preparing them, or when the animals were actually eaten. The relatively frequent transmission from monkey to human is likely to become even more common as more primates are eaten each year.

AIDS isn’t the only virus to come out of the jungle. Monkeypox and Ebola are both diseases exported from African forests in meat. And in 2004, Primate Foamy Virus – functionally similar to AIDS but with no identified symptoms so far – was found in humans. The bushmeat trade not only threatens the ecosystems that sustain African people and culture, but also threatens to release new diseases.

It is possible that a new disease might not break out beyond Africa, as has been the case with Ebola. But diseases have a way of turning up where they’re not expected. Monkeypox entered the U.S. in a Gambian pouch rat bought by a pet shop in Texas, spread to prairie dogs, and from there proceeded to infect 54 people. And AIDS, of course, was first identified in North America.

But there is yet another worrying scenario. In addition to the possibility of a disease spreading in Africa before spreading around the world, is the possibility of an initial outbreak elsewhere. Bushmeat is also popular outside of Africa, and as a result the trade is globalized. According to the BBC, in 2002 up to 10 tons of bushmeat arrived in London daily. Because the trade is illegal, accurate figures are difficult to obtain. According to Justin Brashares, a professor of wildlife ecology at the University of California, Berkeley, the U.S. likely sees a similar amount of Bushmeat as London.

“A very small part of the total sold makes its way overseas, but considering that millions of tonnes of bush meat are sold in Africa each year, a ‘very small part’ can still mean several hundred tons each year arriving [in the united states],” Brashares said in an interview with National Geographic.

The hundreds of tonnes of meat exported around the world don’t undergo health or customs checks, and often reach their destinations half decomposed. As a result, widespread infection could easily originate from such shipments.

It is unclear how the ongoing food crisis has affected the bushmeat trade. Rural populations rely on bushmeat for protein, and it is possible that with the scarcity of crop-grown food, more forest meat is being taken than in previous years.

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One 1997 study, by Dr. Davie Smith and colleagues, quizzed men on the frequency of their orgasms, and followed up ten years later. The findings: men having frequent orgasms had a 50 per cent lower mortality risk than men having infrequent orgasms. That is, after controlling for factors like age and social status, the study concluded that the more orgasms you have, the lower your risk of death.

Another study, conducted by Dr. Leon Abramov, examined the sex lives of 100 Israeli women. Its results were similar, finding that frigidity – an inability to experience orgasm, or indifference to sex – is correlated with heart attack. The women, who had already been hospitalized due to heart attack, took a 57-question interview about their sex lives. Their responses showed a disproportionate number of them to be frigid.

Orgasms may also prevent prostate cancer, according to two studies. An Australian study by Dr. Graham Giles and colleagues found that men who had over four orgasms a week from their twenties through their forties had a one-third lower risk of prostate cancer. And a 2004 American study by Dr. Michael Leitzmann and colleagues found the same thing: high ejaculation frequency is correlated with lowered risk of prostate cancer. The authors speculated that ejaculation might flush out carcinogens from the prostate, or perhaps help it to maintain healthy, new cells.

The problem with all of these studies is that they don’t prove that orgasms cause lower rates of heart disease or prostate cancer – they only prove orgasms are correlated with them. So the studies might be tricking us, making us think orgasm benefits health when actually it’s not orgasm that reduces heart risk, but maybe physical exertion due to sex. Or maybe having a strong libido is the factor that improves health. It’s unclear, since these studies don’t explain any cause-and-effect relationship.

Women’s health magazines and less stringent sexologists have been glad to infer causation from this research, especially as studies showing the positive effects of orgasm add up. More convincingly, the authors of the Smith study state that “evidence of causation is as convincing here as in many other areas where causation is assumed.”

So believing that daily orgasms can help you live longer might not be too crazy – especially if you also take into account the historical use of orgasm. In ancient Egypt and Greece, “medical massage” was used to treat hysteria, a condition thought to result from sexual deprivation. Medical massage thrived over the next two millennia, before fizzling out in the 20th century thanks to the male-dominated medical establishment’s overdeveloped sense of propriety. Perhaps because of this embarrassment, it is only recently that science has focused on the possible connections between orgasm and health.

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This isn’t just a coincidence. For some animal species, pain is a vital part of sex, leading to the release of hormones necessary for impregnation. When lions mate – between 20 to 40 times per day when a female is in estrus – aggressive neck biting is the norm. The males also inflict pain with barbed penises, which cause the female to ovulate by painfully raking the vagina as they withdraw. Pain plays a similar role for rats, which, like lions, require multiple copulations to produce a litter.

For these species, the analgesic qualities of vaginal stimulation are necessary; if sex is an excruciating experience, females won’t want to do it. Komisaruk speculated that his research might explain why humans sometimes engage in painful or violent sexual practices.

“Sexual stimulation could take the edge off the aversive quality of pain and make it just arousing instead of aversive. That could be a basis for combining the two. I think there’s a very close contact between the pain and pleasure systems, which is why facial expressions look pained at orgasm,” he said.

Vaginal stimulation also reduces pain during childbirth. Although giving birth is legendarily painful, Komisaruk said that some women report painless, and even orgasmic feelings during childbirth.

“There are many women who say that childbirth was not painful, and in fact, there are many published reports that childbirth feels like an orgasm. After delivering one or two children it’s not necessarily painful, depending on how stressed and worried the mother is,” he said.

Stress can dampen the analgesic and orgasmic qualities of giving birth just as it can those of intercourse, and is part of the reason why painless childbirths are rare. In North America, anxiety about the painful aspects of childbirth prevents many mothers from entering labour with enough relaxation to benefit from innate painkilling mechanisms.

Stimulation of the anterior vaginal wall reduces pain by blocking the release of a chemical called substance P, which is a major player in pain perception. Stored in the spinal chord, it’s released in response to painful signals, and helps transmit them to the brain.

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Canada began to evaluate the chemical in 1999 when it was first detected in human serum. Since then, evidence for BPA’s toxicity has accumulated, and this September a paper by Dr. Iain Lang and colleagues established a correlation between BPA and human diseases such as heart disease and diabetes.

Canada labelled BPA as toxic earlier this year, a designation that allows ministers to regulate its use. Baby bottles containing BPA were banned, and many drink companies took bottles containing BPA off the shelves. So far, no other country has followed suit.

According to Dr. Wade Welshons, a professor in the endocrine disruptors group at the University of Missouri, the lack of regulation in other countries is a result of industry’s efforts to keep the ten-billion-dollar per year industry going.

“BPA [constitutes] such a large and lucrative market that it just carries itself along. In 1999, the chemical industry hired a tobacco industry lobbyist – the Wienberg group – to protect the product. They did a very thorough job of creating doubt that second-hand smoke was dangerous, and the same kind of techniques are just being applied more broadly to BPA,” Welshons said.

The industry response to the Lang paper is a typical example of such techniques. Officials are emphasizing that the Lang paper did not find that BPA causes disease, but only that it is correlated with it.

It is important to note, however, that to confirm causation researchers would have to inject human subjects with BPA – which is illegal – and observe their health.

Researchers instead use animal subjects, like mice and rats, to study causation. Through such studies, they have found that BPA does cause health deterioration, which might substantiate a causative relationship between BPA and disease.

Stephen Hentges, of the pro-industry American Chemical Council, ignored the numerous studies on animal models when he dismissed the Lang paper for not establishing causality.

“At least from this study, we cannot draw any conclusion that BPA causes any health effect…. Further research will be needed to understand whether these statistical associations have any relevance at all for human health,” he said in a September interview with Reuters.

Welshons does not applaud this view.

“That’s the usual absurd comment,” he said.

Despite suggestions of BPA’s adverse effects on health, firmer evidence is still needed to convince regulators such as the FDA – who resist the idea of killing off such a lucrative industry – that BPA should be restricted. According to Dr. Robert Wallace, a co-author of the Lang paper and an epidimiologist at the University of Iowa, that may be difficult to achieve.

“It’s a scientific problem that has many dimensions. The approach is to triangulate different studies of tissues, lab animals, and cell cultures, all of which have a cumulative effect. What we’d like to do from a human perspective is find a population of people whose exposure to BPA is known and follow their health over a number of years,” Wallace said.

But while scientists spend years building an unassailable fortress of evidence that BPA causes disease, the chemical continues to tamper with fetal development and potentially harm adult health. The vast majority of people have BPA in their serum; it leaches from the plastic lining of canned foods and water bottles, for example, and is often present in tap water. A 2007 consensus statement by 38 BPA experts noted that most adults have BPA levels above those that harm animals. According to Maricel Maffini, a professor at Tufts University, regulatory agencies shouldn’t wait on studies that may take many years.

“Because these studies are so long- term, research on laboratory animals needs to be taken more seriously. In any science you do, animals are considered a gold standard – except in the field of endocrine disruptors like BPA,” Maffini said.

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Such studies indicate that games are strong educational tools that could one day find a place in formal education.

According to Dr. Constance Steinkuehler of the University of Wisconsin, part of the reason that games have such educational value is because they allow people to access exceptional situations. “Games are really powerful tools for learning because they allow you to take on roles you can’t take on in the real world, and inhabit spaces you can’t inhabit in the real world,” Steinkuehler said.

This has been known to flight schools since the first realistic flight simulators were designed in the late 1970s. Today, simulators are required during pilot training because they give experience in dangerous situations like engine failure or hurricanes. Dr. Douglas Gentile, the Director of Research for the National Institute on Media and the Family, foresees a similar simulator for surgeons.

“All our bodies are very different when you open them up. The fourth body you open up might be very different from the first, second, or third. With a video game we would scan 50 different bodies, and program in 50 of the most typical types of errors that can occur. [The traditional method] does not give you experience with the errors,” Gentile said.

However, the educational benefits of video games go beyond simulations. A recent study found that video game playing, more than experience, was a predictor of surgical skill. Surgeons that had played at least three hours of popular games a week were 27 per cent faster and made 37 per cent fewer mistakes than video-game-free surgeons. The study, called The Impact of Video Games on Training Surgeons in the 21st Century, was conducted by a research group of which Gentile was a part. To follow up their findings, the same group did another study, which found that playing video games – like Star Wars: Pod Racer, or the sniper game Silent Scope – for only 18 minutes before an operation was enough to significantly boost laproscopic surgeons’ speed and success in the operating room. The researchers think that the games, which require manual dexterity and use of the non-dominant hand, improved surgeons’ fine motor coordination.

Aside from improving motor coordination, games have also been shown to encourage logical thinking. This is true not only for games with complicated strategy and puzzles, like the Civilization and Myst series, but for less complex games as well. Steinkuehler analyzed discussion forums of the popular multiplayer role playing game World of Warcraft and found examples of scientific thinking – such as reasoning through models, making predictions, or using math – in 58 per cent of posts. Furthermore, she found that a striking number of gamers shared knowledge to solve problems.

“We were really shocked that an overwhelmingly large proportion of posts were problem solving. We found 86 per cent when I would have hypothesized 30 per cent – on a good day,” Steinkeuhler said.

As part of her ongoing research, Steinkeuhler organizes after-school gaming clubs which may help students succeed in the classroom. Although her research is ongoing, and the idea of incorporating video games into education is still young, Steinkeuhler said video games are getting more attention as educational tools.

“There’s a huge movement that’s all about the incorporation of games into education. This is definitely coming down the pipe,” she said.

Like the historical controversy over comics, movies, and dancing, the controversy over video games may soon seem short-sighted hysteria.

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My job at the ward was to brighten the place with my carefree youth, and more specifically, my piano skills. Every Thursdays I volunteered for an hour, playing for an audience of five to 15 patients. For those who have played music competitively, play once in a place like this and a concert hall will never be the same. The Long Term Care ward may not be the most glamourous place to perform, but there, the most stumbling performance garners exclamations of joy, truncated sonatas are greeted with riotous applause, and truly excellent concerts invite tears and runny noses.

It took me a while to get those tears I now cherish so much because I made the mistake of playing Mozart, whose music tends to be light and emotionally removed. I chose his lightest, brightest pieces, thinking darker music – the melancholy Chopin, and stormy Beethoven – wouldn’t fly in such a place.

After a few weeks as a volunteer, I got an unexpected request. A patient wanted to hear Chopin’s funeral march. The song is as depressing as it sounds. Feeling slightly ashamed, I played it complete with plodding chords and mournful melody – only to receive exclamations of joy.

The patients’ responses encouraged me to test the waters. I turned to Beethoven, selecting sonatas he wrote towards the end of his life, most of which are emotional odysseys, treating issues like damnation and salvation, life and death. The following week as I played one of these, half-way through the first movement of a four movement sonata, I heard sobs. Looking across the room, I spotted the source: a 96-year-old woman whose face was covered in huge tears.

Playing at the hospital made me realize that I had found Beethoven’s true audience. It’s not a silent group of intellectuals stiffly poised in an austere concert hall, but a noisy mishmash of the sick and dying; it is not people at the height of their cognitive powers, but those losing them. Maybe because they saw their own struggles reflected in his music, maybe because the good things in life seem more valuable close to death, those patients intuitively connected to Beethoven’s music.

There is healing in this catharsis. Recent studies, such as one looking into the effect of music therapy on neurological patients, conducted at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability in the U.K., have shown that music therapy can speed the recovery of neurological patients. A Stanford study found that music therapy helped older adults overcome depression by improving their engagement with and responsiveness to their surroundings, emotional expressiveness, socialization, and overall quality of life.

Helping people by doing something you love gives you a feeling something like a drug rush. So, although when I started playing for the sick I expected doom and gloom, I soon began to look forward to hospital Thursdays. Whether I arrived cold, stressed, sleep deprived, or grumpy, I invariably left afterwards with what can only be described as a high that lasted for hours.

If you play music – be it classical, jazz, or neo-ambient trip hop – I suggest that you visit these hospital audiences at least once. Aside from getting to perform in front of a rapt audience and enjoying some head-swelling praise, you might come to the same, life-changing conclusion that I did: humanitarianism is tragically underrated.

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This is news to the public health world, which thought it had identified the causes of infant mortality during the “Child Survival Revolution”. A movement led by UNICEF in the eighties, the Child Survival Revolution was meant to address the major preventable causes of child mortality, like infection and malnutrition. It worked; researchers studied hospital records to identify the main causes of death, created programs that would save lives, and by the end of the decade 12-million children were saved.

But drowning went unnoticed. Hospitals had no record of drowning deaths, because the families of drowned children didn’t report their loss. According to Dr. Steve Beerman, president of the International Life Saving Federation, the new surveys of Asia have dramatically revised the WHO’s 2007 world drowning report estimate of 400,000 deaths per year.

“Our most recent estimate with new data from Asia places the global drowning burden over one million per year,” Beerman said.

Little has been done to solve the problem. Beerman said that there is an acute lack of funding for anti-drowning initiatives.

“As an example of the lack of resource allocation to drowning, Malaria has a global mortality of 1.2 -million per year, and of those about 20 per cent are children. Malaria gets $4.5- billion for programs of reduction, control, and study. Drowning gets less than $400,000 globally,” Beernman said.

Canada has been a key player in exposing this imbalance, and through its own surveys pioneered the methodology that made today’s clearer picture of the drowning burden possible. The country’s involvement has been partly motivated by the drowning burden within Canada: aboriginal and ethnic populations suffer high drowning rates, and in total, over 400 Canadian children drown each year.

Solutions to the global drowning crisis are simple. In developed nations, drownings usually occur in recreational settings like pools. Fencing pools, teaching children to swim, and raising public awareness may have all contributed to the 30 per cent decline in drowning deaths within Canada since 1990.

In undeveloped nations, on the other hand, drowning is a danger of daily life. According to the recent report called Drowning in the Developing world, published by the Alliance for Safe Children, most Asian and African children are exposed to a huge number of drowning risks every day.

“There are extraordinarily high exposure rates to potential drowning hazards that occur on a daily basis in almost every child’s daily activities,” the report stated.

Despite the toll infant drownings take on families and society in much of the developing world, a culture of water safety and swimming hasn’t evolved. Beerman remarks that such an evolution is hindered by beliefs regarding water held by some people in poor nations.

“There are many mythical and cultural beliefs in Asia and Africa about drowning. For some, if you save someone from the Goddess of the sea, you will be the next to die. Others believe drowning is their god’s wish,” he said.

Pilot projects to reduce drowning deaths are underway in Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Vietnam. The initiatives focus on teaching survival swimming, which increases survival rate by 50 per cent, and social awareness of the drowning problem. With support from rich nations, the pilot projects will soon be scaled up to national and regional levels.

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Dr. Harpending, an anthropologist at the University of Utah and co-author of the paper, says that the findings have come as a jolt to the scientific community.

“Everyone has been so surprised that no one has broken down the implications yet,” he said.

Our accelerated evolution is powered in part by population. Over the past 80 millennia, human population has increased steadily, and with it the pool of mutated genes we carry. Most mutations are not beneficial, leading to weaker or less “fit” individuals who don’t have as many offspring. But when a mutation is helpful, it gets passed on to the next generation, mixed into the greater population, and can become common. The more people, the more helpful mutations appear, and evolution moves faster – from a crawl to a creep.

Aside from population, our environment has caused accelerated evolution as well. When human beings first expanded out of Africa around 60,000 years ago, they were faced with new environments and new challenges. Habitats like tundra or mountainous regions changed the terms of human life, and therefore impacted the content of human DNA. For instance, whereas in Africa people who could brave the noonday sun survived, in Siberia, survival depended on weathering the cold. Such differences caused different mutations to be favoured, and different traits to evolve.

Yet perhaps the most radical new environment was the city, made possible by agriculture. With cities came high population densities, and with high densities came deadly epidemics. In turn, those who survived the epidemics became resistant to the disease, and this was sometimes conferred by new mutations. The paper in PNAS found that, of the 1,800 genes changed during the last 80,000 years, many were related to fighting off illness.

Dr. Bisson, Department Chair of Anthropology at McGill, says that while it’s true that there have been huge changes in where and how humans live, some might still debate whether the evolutionary acceleration is as recent as the paper suggests.

“Humans as biological entities have responded through evolution to particular ecological circumstances, which have indeed changed in the past 80,000 years…but some paleontologists might disagree and argue for a longer time span,” he said.

The paper’s results were obtained by a simple method called linkage disequilibrium. Human DNA doesn’t occur as a single long strand, but a set of shorter strands called chromosomes. Everybody has two sets of chromosomes: one from the father’s side and one from the mother’s side. When a sperm or egg is generated, chromosomes from both parents line up and swap small chunks of DNA. The swapped chunks may contain identical genes, or different versions of the same genes.

A new version of a gene created by a mutation has specific neighbouring genes. When it’s swapped, it gets new neighbours on the new chromosome. If the mutation is old, then enough swapping will have happened that the gene appears with all sorts of neighbours. If the mutation is new, then the gene will always be found with the same neighbors, because not much swapping has happened. By this method, young genes can be tracked down.

The investigators found far more young genes than they had expected to find, and concluded that the rate of human evolution is accelerating. Compared to our near evolutionary cousins, such as chimpanzees, we are evolving very rapidly. Where our fast evolution will take us is something that remains to be seen – in a hundred thousand years or so.

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