Bathroom Medicine Cabinet

Cactus Thieves Running Amok

They look sturdy, even hostile, but cactus plants in the southwestern United States and Mexico are under attack. According to wildlife conservationists, cactuses are being dug up and smuggled away at an alarming rate by over-zealous collectors looking for rare species and "narco-tourists" mining the desert for the small, psychotropic peyote plant.

The thievery is fueled in part by the conservation effort itself. "International rules aimed at preventing the movement of plants and seeds in order to protect them have had unintended consequences," says Dick Wiedhopf, president of the Cactus and Succulent Society of America and its Tucson chapter. "They have made [cactuses] more valuable." That explains why wildlife — including cactus — ranks just below drugs and guns as the most popular good smuggled out of Mexico, according to experts.

Cactus collectors are a surprisingly fervid bunch. A trawl of the enthusiasts' presence on the Internet — some of the plants' biggest fans are in Scandinavia, the Czech Republic and Japan — yields hundreds of sites offering information about cactuses as well as nurseries where collectors can buy. "There are more sites, more information than we have ever had," Wiedhopf says. "It's marvelous. That's the upside." The problem is that some collectors don't want to buy from nurseries. Rather than purchasing from, say, the acres and acres of cacti nurseries in the Netherlands, avid collectors travel to Mexico instead, according to Dr. Martin Terry, a biologist at Sul Ross University in West Texas and co-founder of the Cactus Conservation Institute (CCI), where they "roam the boondocks, see a rare species, dig it up and FedEx it home, avoiding all the inspections along the way." For the travel-averse, there's no shortage of cactus dealers online: a 2005 Mexican study found nearly 4,000 websites selling cactuses, and 500 were run by illicit traders, who constantly switch Web servers and names to elude law enforcement. "The downside," says Wiedhopf, "is that this is a world where some people have a sense of greed, a need for personal acquisition."

"Mexico's cactus diversity attracts the interest of international markets and collectors who employ illegal tactics to obtain wild-collected specimens of desirable species, some of which may be newly named to science, rare, or threatened with extinction," according to a World Wildlife Fund study authored by Rolando Barcenas Luna of the Autonomous University of Queretaro, Mexico. Barcenas and Terry are members of a team of biologists currently mapping several threatened cactus species through DNA sampling, but their project is often stymied by growing threats to the plants from illegal harvesting and destruction by drug traffickers. There are almost 700 species of cactus in Mexico and a third of them are threatened; consequently scientists keep location information private in their database, Terry says, but despite their efforts, the destruction continues.

There are laws in both the southwestern U.S. and Mexico, plus international trade regulations that protect endangered and threatened cactus, and also govern the sale and movement of other cactus species. But since most cactus plants flourish in desert regions with low populations and infrequent law enforcement, catching smugglers is a challenge, often made even more difficult in Mexico by poverty: local residents sell plants for a pittance to smugglers who then sell them to collectors at much higher prices, according to experts.

Two hundred and seventy miles south of the U.S.–Mexico border, the dusty old mining town of Real de Catorce has been reborn. Though the Mexican government officially condemns the harvesting of the psychotropic peyote cactus by anyone outside the Huichol Indian community of Central Mexico, whose members use it for religious purposes, Real de Catorce's website advertises the town as the place of the "pilgrimage of people of all ages and nationalities...[who] travel thousands of miles to arrive at this sacred site and experience a mystical communion with the magical cactus." Now narco-tourists are ravaging the Huichols' sacred peyote lands, says Terry, who surveyed the countryside himself this summer. He says he found many sites in the region laid to waste, the mescaline extracted and the plants destroyed.

In Texas, harvesting of peyote has been licensed since the 1970s for use in the Native American Church. But the number of legal peyote harvesters, known as peyoteros, has shrunk from two dozen to just three. Most of the land in South Texas where peyote grows is privately held (Texas law prohibits removal of cactus from public land), so peyoteros must pay landowners to access their ranchland. The job is hardly worth the hazards, however: rugged land populated with dangerous wildlife and, sometimes, even more dangerous smugglers. And the fees that go to absentee landowners — a few hundred dollars a year — don't justify the potential legal liability they'll face if peyoteros get hurt on their property, Terry says. So, the peyote patches that end up being most easily accessible to harvesters are over-picked to meet growing demand from the church.

Meanwhile, the hunt for peyote has also driven the star cactus to the brink of endangerment, Terry warns — the star cactus looks confusingly similar to peyote to the untrained eye — and Terry has surveyed many large star cactus sites destroyed in South Texas, prompting CCI to raise funds for a cactus preserve in four counties along the Rio Grande.

Cactus-rescue programs are also underway in neighboring Arizona, which has some of the most stringent cactus collection and preservation laws in the U.S. Landowners and developers in that state, for example, cannot move any cactus from its natural habitat without a license from the Department of Agriculture — and all legally moved or sold cactuses, even the tiny souvenir plants sold at the Phoenix airport, come with an official tag. So, conservationists have stepped in with an everybody-wins plan: the Tucson Cactus Society's internationally recognized rescue program seeks permission to harvest plants at development and mining sites, tag and sell them — the money raised goes into teaching grants aimed at raising cactus awareness in local schools.

The society is now gearing up to launch another protection program for Arizona's signature cactus, the saguaro, whose beautiful white blossoms are the state flower. While the saguaro is not among Arizona's seven endangered cactus species, the shallow-rooted plant is often preyed upon by poachers, who can earn up to $60 a foot for a wild specimen, Wiedhopf says. The desert symbol grows slowly, about an inch a year — it can take six or seven decades for the saguaro cactus to grow an arm — and those 15-to-20-foot saguaros that dot the Sonoran desert can be over 200 years old. According to state law, any saguaro cactus over four feet tall cannot be moved from public or private land without a permit. To help prevent their removal, the Cactus Society has initiated talks with state and federal wildlife officials about implanting wild saguaros with memory chips that can be scanned and tracked.

But despite conservationists best efforts, poachers and drug smugglers have little regard for them — or for protection laws. Some hard-core collectors won't miss any opportunity to swipe a cactus. That's why visitors to Copenhagen's botanical gardens must view rare cactus plants behind glass walls and, as a curator at London's world famous Kew Gardens told Terry, "Every year, we put out a plant and every year someone steals it."

Gut Decisions May Not Be Smart

If you have ever struggled with a difficult decision — new job vs. new boyfriend, sports car vs. minivan, read the book vs. see the movie — you have likely also been offered a heap of decision-making wisdom. Make a list of pros and cons. Go with your gut. Sleep on it.

It was this last bit of advice — sleep on it — espoused in a paper by Dutch researchers and published in the journal Science in 2006, that really irked Ben Newell, a researcher himself at the University of New South Wales in Australia. That paper suggested that people might be better off relying on unconscious deliberation to make complex decisions — despite an abundance of scientific evidence to the contrary — given that the human brain can reasonably only focus on a few things at a time. Once people have all the necessary information to make a decision, the paper found, too much conscious deliberation could lead to unnecessary attention given to extraneous factors.

Newell's answer to the Science paper is called "Think, Blink or Sleep on It? The Impact of Modes of Thought on Complex Decision Making," co-authored with colleagues at the University of New South Wales and the University of Essex in England, and published in the most recent issue of the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. It took four experiments to make the point, but Newell's conclusion is that unconscious deliberation is no more effective than conscious deliberation — using lists of pros vs. cons, for example — for making complex decisions, and that if anything, people who deliberate methodically are better off. "If you have to make decisions, you have to do your homework," says Newell. "There is no magic unconscious."

In Newell's first experiment, 71 students were asked to choose an apartment from a list of four, each with its own specific pros and cons — nasty neighbors but a friendly roommate, a low-crime neighborhood but expensive rent, in-house gym but a small living space. Only one apartment, Flat B, had an equally weighted mix of pros and cons, thus representing the best choice. (On balance, the other apartments' drawbacks outweighed their benefits; that is, even when an apartment description had a longer list of positive attributes, those pros were lightweight and insignificant compared to the shorter list of cons.)

The students were divided into three groups: the first was asked to choose one of the apartments immediately after getting information about them; the second group was given four minutes to deliberate before deciding; and the third group was asked to solve anagrams for four minutes before making their choice. (The idea was to distract the students' conscious mind, and allow their unconscious to tackle the apartment decision.) The researchers found that in every case, the students were equally likely to choose Flat B, the only unit with an equal balance of pros and cons.

Newell had expected to replicate the Dutch results in the experiment; that is, he thought the anagram-solving group would be more likely than the others to go with Flat B. When that didn't happen, he redesigned the experiment, giving an additional four minutes of decision-making time to the conscious and unconscious deliberators. But, once again, he got the same result — all the students were equally likely to choose the best apartment.

Persevering, in a third experiment Newell decided to re-stage the original Dutch study as closely as possible; that experiment had involved choosing among four cars, instead of four apartments. Newell asked 90 students to choose their preference from four fictional cars, which each varied on 12 attributes, such as gas mileage, handling and whether it had a sunroof. Again, one car of the bunch had an equally weighted list of pros and cons. This time unconscious thinkers actually did worse — they were less likely to pick the best car — than conscious thinkers.

"I was flummoxed," says Newell, "I did some research to try to figure out why the Dutch had been able to see differences we hadn't." Theorizing that perhaps the students' decisions could be influenced by the order in which the information was presented to them, Newell set about designing a fourth, and final, experiment.

This time he asked 119 students to choose between only two cars, which were equally attractive. Both cars had pros and cons, but neither car was measurably better than the other; the key was the order in which students received the information. Students were again divided into three groups: the instant deciders, the conscious deliberators and the unconscious deliberators. These groups were then each subdivided into two groups. One received positive information about one car or the other first; one received the positive information last.

This time, researchers found a significant difference in who picked which car. Students in the unconscious deliberation group who heard positive attributes after the negative ones, tended to pick the car they heard about last. In the conscious deliberation group, however, the order in which information was presented had no effect on which car students chose. When people are distracted, they tend to forget what they've just been told, says Newell. When they try to recall the information, the thing they remember best is the last positive information they heard — a phenomenon that researchers call the "recency effect" (and one that advertisers have found very useful). Newell thinks a similar factor may have been what influenced the "sleep on it" results in the Dutch study, but because he doesn't know what order the Dutch subjects were given their information, he can't say for certain. "Both cars in the experiment were equal, so I would expect roughly equal numbers of the subjects to chose each car," says Newell.

Newell admits that his own experiments have their limitations. Using hypothetical scenarios about fictional apartments and cars can tell researchers only so much. "People are not really engaging in these decisions," Newell says. Even so, researchers understand the pathways in which conscious decisions are made, but have no way of understanding the unconscious, so he says, "It's overly bold to recommend that as a way of making decisions."

Of course, not every decision requires you to write a dissertation about its options. Making a gut decision is a perfectly respectable way to, say, choose your lunch. There are other decisions, however, that feel like gut decisions — ones we make quickly and without much apparent conscious thought — that may involve more higher-order thinking, or experience, than we realize. Newell offers the example of a doctor he knows, who insists he can make patients' diagnoses based on gut decisions. "But that doctor has 20 to 30 years of experience, and has in the past employed deliberate decision-making. So maybe over time, these decisions become automated," says Newell. "Going with your 'gut' may be right when you're an expert. For example, maybe choosing lunch every day is easy because we do it every day. But we don't move every day, so when making a choice about where to live, we have no expertise."

"All I'm saying is if you've got a tough decision, thinking about it is better than hoping some magical unconscious thing will solve it for you," he says. Newell himself has to make a big decision now — choosing a place for his family to live. He's already made his list of pros and cons.

New at the Gym?

If you've ever made the mistake of trying to do too much too soon at the gym you'll love this tongue-in-cheek account of one week with a personal trainer Adonis...

Her first week at the gym

Just remember to take it easy when you start to exercise...

Salmonella Outbreak Over, CDC Says

(WASHINGTON) — The government said Thursday that the salmonella outbreak that sickened at least 1,440 people appears to be over, but its ultimate source may never be known, partly because of shortcomings in the nation's food safety system.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration said they found strong evidence to implicate jalapeño and serrano peppers, and a farm in Mexico, in the largest outbreak of foodborne illness in a decade. Investigators were unable to clear domestic and imported tomatoes, however, although the evidence against tomatoes is weaker.

The FDA also lifted its warning that consumers avoid eating jalapeño and serrano peppers from Mexico. But officials pointedly said that doesn't guarantee another such outbreak can be prevented.

"None of us can provide a cast-iron guarantee that salmonella saintpaul will not re-emerge," said Dr. David Acheson, the FDA's food safety chief. "We have not identified the total source of this."

FDA and CDC officials said a number of steps are needed to improve the safety of fresh produce, even as the government and the medical community are urging consumers to eat more fruits and vegetables for better nutrition.

Among those measures: Standard procedures and more funding to allow state laboratories to test samples of suspected pathogens more rapidly. Congressional action to give the FDA authority to impose produce safety regulations. And industry action to develop a faster system for tracing back to the farm any produce items suspected in an outbreak.

The CDC said the outbreak began in late April, and that by early August the number of new cases had fallen to levels that would be considered normal. Most victims got sick during May and June. And there have been no new restaurant clusters of cases since early July. That "is an important indication that this particular outbreak is over," said Dr. Robert Tauxe, deputy director of CDC's foodborne illness branch.

Texas was the hardest-hit state, accounting for nearly 40 percent of the all confirmed cases. People were sickened in 43 states and Washington, D.C.

The joint investigation by CDC and the FDA found strong evidence that jalapeno peppers were a major carrier of the outbreak bacteria, and that serrano peppers were also a carrier. It was the first time that jalapenos were implicated in such an outbreak.

The salmonella strain was traced back to a jalapeño pepper at a produce distribution center in Texas that received peppers from Mexico. But FDA investigators struck out when they performed tests at the farm in Mexico where they believed the pepper had been grown.

Instead, they found the bacteria on another Mexican farm about 100 miles away from the first. The outbreak strain was isolated from water in a pond used for irrigation and from a sample of serrano peppers. Acheson said it is not completely clear that the second farm was the source of the outbreak.

Both farms provided produce to a common packing facility in Mexico, which shipped to the United States. That raises the possibility that contamination could have occurred during packing and shipping.

Consumers around the country first heard about the problem June 7, when the FDA issued a broad warning against eating various kinds of tomatoes.

Yet the extensive probe found not a single contaminated tomato. Still, investigators said they cannot rule tomatoes out as a carrier, particularly early in the outbreak. Interviews with patients who got sick suggested a strong link to tomatoes, which had been implicated in previous salmonella outbreaks.

"We continue to believe that association could reflect real contamination early on," said CDC's Tauxe. But he acknowledged the evidence is weaker when it comes to tomatoes.

"It is information that is more restricted in time and does not have confirmatory laboratory findings behind it," he said.

As the focus shifted to peppers, the U.S. tomato industry complained that the government had unfairly singled it out based on flimsy evidence, leading to an estimated $250 million in losses.

How Long Does Flu Immunity Last?

Every year in the fall, physicians dispense a new flu vaccine. Typically it is designed to protect against the three flu strains that epidemiologists predict will be the most pervasive that season. But how often have patients received the flu shot, only to catch a bad illness anyway? The problem is that cold and flu viruses mutate so rapidly that sometimes they're unrecognizable to the antibodies created by the body in response to any particular vaccine. It turns out, however, that those antibodies — unlike those against illnesses like tetanus or whooping cough — can provide a formidable and life-long defense against the flu, as long as they're pitted against the correct strain. For an explanation, TIME asks Eric Altschuler, assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and co-author of a recent paper in Nature about antibodies to the 1918 pandemic flu virus.

Q: How long do flu antibodies last?

A: According to our study, it appears they can last the entire lifespan of the human organism — 90 years plus.

In our study we were looking for antibodies to the 1918 flu. This flu virus was reconstructed a number of years ago in the lab, so we were able to test to see if 90 years later we could still find antibodies. I recruited survivors, people who were born in 1915 or earlier and thus presumably survived the 1918 flu. We found that virtually all the people born in 1915 or earlier — about 90% of them — had good "titers" to the 1918 flu, which means they still had reasonably high concentrations of the antibodies in their blood, whereas among controls, people who were born in 1926 or later, it was only about 10%. That was really quite a remarkable finding.

The important question in this study is whether the antibodies still work after all that time, and I think my colleagues really found some very decisive results. I sent the blood samples from the survivors to my colleagues, Chris Basler at Mount Sinai, who's a professor of microbiology, and James Crowe at Vanderbilt, who's in pediatrics, microbiology and immunology. Dr Crowe and his colleagues at Vanderbilt isolated five different antibodies to the 1918 flu. Then Dr. Basler and colleagues looked at how those antibodies bind to the virus. It was quite strong and specific. We tried to compare it to other viruses, studying, for example, whether the antibody would bind to the flu of 1999 or to earlier ones, like the 1943 flu. Most antibodies bound to 1918, and only 1918. One of them bound, but much more weakly, to a couple of others. So that was really quite good evidence, we thought.

I think the most definitive experiment we did was in mice. If you give mice the 1918 influenza, it kills them quite rapidly. It's very lethal. Terry Tumpey at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention infected mice with the various strains that made up the 1918 flu. Then we treated the mice either with our five antibodies or with controls. (There were two controls. One was human gamma globulin, which are just pooled antibodies that bind to a lot of different things. The other was the antibody to one of the modern bird flus.) And all of the control-treated mice, whether they got the gamma globulin or the bird-flu antibody, they all died. All of those mice died. Meanwhile all the mice that were treated with the highest doses of our antibodies survived. That's really very strong evidence — the strongest — that these antibodies are functional against this virus.

I think that diseases, other viruses and other pathogens, can behave differently. Antibodies are made by something called memory B cells, and the memory B cells for the 1918 flu clearly live for the lifespan of the human organism, which is wonderful. It raises important questions for looking at other pathogens, however, and it's important to try to look at these questions for different pathogens individually. Evidence shows it's important to get a regular tetanus booster, for example. Still, our new study may suggest another angle to look at things, which is how long do memory B cells last for this or that? Maybe there's some underlying biology that could explain why one thing might last longer than another.