Beautiful Life, foundations I, foundations II, foundations III, foundations IV, foundations V, Unity Radio

March 16, 2020 (cynthiaoccelli.com)

Sweet friend,

I care about how you feel right now. My goal for this note is to anchor you in your center, empower you to choose your strongest self, and soothe and steady you.

This note is a work in progress and I will continue to add resources to strengthen and ground you during this challenge. Please leave your comments and questions or use the contact us button on the bottom of the page. We are going to get through this. How you feel as you get through it is my concern.

xo,

Cynthia

Virtually the whole world is experiencing the impacts of measures to control the current viral pandemic. It’s alarming to witness entire countries close borders and stores and cancel flights, services, and events. It’s tragic that some people who contract the virus do not recover. All of this is factual and beyond your control.

Many people are cascading through intense cycles of fear in reaction to these out of control events and they’re panicking, hoarding, feeling paranoid that their very survival is at stake. Feeling and behaving this way is not beyond your control. In fact, this is the area you have great dominion over, your internal state.

Emotion is moving energy. It moves in our bodies and is highly contagious. Sadness, anger, joy, patriotism, and celebratory feelings are all examples of emotions that spread when enough people feel them. Fearful emotions spread like wildfire.

Check-in and Change

Before you read on, check-in with yourself. Be honest, no stiff upper lips or stoicism. How are you doing? Do you feel safe? Are you a little off? Or is everything inside you spiraling? Whatever your answer, it’s okay. Recognize it without judging it. Observe it. It’s not you. It’s a feeling.

This page is a resource designed to guide you to a grounded, centered state of fortitude.

Let’s get to work.

Listen to this show for audio to go with this page: Be the Eye of the Storm

Prime Yourself To Grasp This Information – Breathwork

Okay, I am working from the premise that you have done the breathwork in the drop-down above.

Right now, in the midst of change and uncertainty, you can work to help yourself into an increased state of calm and centered wholeness.

This note is broken into sections to speak to different aspects of this challenge and your mind. All of them are designed to put your feet on the ground and pull your mind out of fear. You can read it in order, or go to a header that feels interesting right now. Go to whatever you can grasp and then go back to what you skipped.

Challenge Navigation Guidelines

Here are some guidelines for handling this and most any significant challenge. Click the rule for an explanation of the guideline. Take them slow. Read each one and reflect on it. Take one into meditation. See yourself becoming better able to control your inner world. Your outer world will reflect your changes. This is the most important work.

I understand how my thoughts interact with my body and health.

Nothing happens in a vacuum; there is a connection at every level. Every act impacts someone or something else. This is true within our bodies too.

The CDC cites stress at the leading cause of disease. If you are living in stress, it is exacerbating all of the challenges you’re facing.

“Certain types of chronic and more insidious stress due to loneliness, poverty, bereavement, depression and frustration due to discrimination are associated with impaired immune system resistance to viral linked disorders ranging from the common cold and herpes to AIDS and cancer.  Stress can have effects on hormones, brain neurotransmitters, additional small chemical messengers elsewhere, prostaglandins, as well as crucial enzyme systems, and metabolic activities that are still unknown.  Research in these areas may help to explain how stress contributes to depression, anxiety and its diverse effects on the gastrointestinal tract, skin and other organs.” Stress.org

In addition to causing physical aging and disease, stress blocks inspiration, creative flow and the ability to see the bigger picture. From this contracted space we cannot create success, happiness, health or joy.

What is stress?
Stress is the result of your thinking. It comes from your thoughts about what you’re focusing on. Whether something is stressful or not is highly subjective. Many people experiencing today’s global challenge are not feeling stressed. I am among them.

I am not superior. I don’t have special qualities. I have lived a life that’s presented massive upheaval and life-changing challenges and it taught me that I can control what I allow to occur inside of me. I can control what I focus on. I can choose not to undermine myself or allow outside influences or circumstances to undermine me. I have worked myself up into frenzies that left me trembling in corners and relegated to desperation so intense that I just gave up.

At the bottom, I discovered how to operate my mind and body. I learned how my systems work and that if I wanted to thrive and connect with higher forces, I had to live at that level of energy.

The good news is you can learn and practice this for yourself and change the way you show up and feel during challenges.

Here’s a look inside the body’s response to your thoughts about events. Remember when you perceive life as scary and threatening you feel stressed. When you perceive life as an experience with challenges that you can handle you feel empowered. The state you end up in dictates your what how your autonomic nervous system responds.

Your body’s autonomic nervous system is made up of the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. Here’s a table and a graphic to illustrate their different effects. While you read, consider which system is most often activated in your body?

Parasympathetic Response – Relax and Renew	Sympathetic Response – Stress and Defend
decreased blood pressure	increased blood pressure
hormones of relaxation and regulation flow (acetylcholine, oxytocin)	stress hormones spike and circulate (cortisol, epinephrine)
body relaxes and feels safe	body readies to flee from danger
digestion increases as blood flows	digestion slows as blood is diverted
feel calm, relaxed, able to assess circumstances patiently, reasonably, flexible thought, open to higher solutions, responsive	feel anxious, charges, unable to rest, or think with altitude, hyper-vigilant, and over-focused, reactive

There’s a lot you can do to help reduce stress reactions and move back into a state of relaxation and renewal. Here are some approaches:

1) The breathing process shared at the opening of this page when practiced for more than four minutes helps move the body from a stress reaction to the relaxation response.  Click here to go to it.

2) Meditation. Meditation is not thinking with your eyes closed. That’s actually going to allow you to stay stressed and will not create any changes. Meditation is a fast from thinking. Focus on your breathing. If you find it challenging to get quiet. Follow a guided meditation. I have some free ones here.

3) Massage and touch. If you’re home with healthy loved ones massage each other. If you have a pet, devote 10-15 minutes to just petting and connecting with them. If you’re alone, use a pleasant oil and rub your own hands, arms, neck, and shoulders. All of these bring you into the present and help the body relax.

4) News and media fast: Smartphone use has been shown to increase heart rate and lower autonomic nervous system activity. Take a break from all electronics and get back in touch with living in the present without being bombarded with fear-inducing information.

5) As mentioned in another section of this note, exercise has a miraculous effect on relaxation, hormones, depression, and well-being. It’s like taking anti-depressants. Find something that works for you at this time. Yoga (I do video classes on Youtube). Walking in nature. Stretch and do 20 push-ups, 50 squats, and 30 sit-ups (work up to this and take your time). Repeat 2-4 times if you’re conditioned. Clean your house with passion. Dance. Get creative.

6) Get into nature. If this is possible for you, do it. Get out under the sky and trees. Breathe and let nature restore and ground you.

7) Cultivate pleasure. What makes you feel really good and has no negative consequence? Do that. This rules out barrels of bonbons and a 72 hour Netflix fest. Consider being creative. Do you like to draw, paint, write, dance, sing?

I distinguish between what I can and can’t control.

Let go, release, step-away from everything that you have no influence over. Say a prayer and take your focus off of fear-based what if’s. Invest that energy into something you can impact (your health, your home, your mind, helping others in safe ways). 

Do something about what you can control.

What you can control:

– CDC’s recommendations for preventing the spread of the virus (click here to see them). It’s wise to be informed and to take proactive precautions. Take them for yourself and for your fellow humans. Accept them. Practice them. Move forward.

-Your emotional and behavioral response to this event.

-Who you talk with about this event.

-Your mental diet. This includes what you watch, read, and think about. Choose a reputable source of information and check it once or twice a day for information that may be relevant to your area and situation. Do not leave the news running, repeatedly check it on your phone, listen to news radio shows or other mediums that deplete and incite fear. Listen to my podcasts and radio shows here. I promise to leave you better off at the end of every show.

-Your physical diet, activity level, sleep hygiene, and internal well-being.

-The kindness, care, love, generosity, and compassion you give yourself and others.

–Your ability to find positive ways to use this time at home. Clean up. Organize. Exercise. Write. Read. Learn a language. Grow.

What you can’t control:

-The media and its scare tactics

-Panic-stricken and hysterical people. Your best chance to change them is to model being genuinely grounded and centered. Invest in you.

-Events outside of your home, family, or business. Let go.

-Politicians and community leaders. Do vote for what your calm heart and rational mind tell you.

-The daily shifts, surprises, and changes inherent to this event. Let go.

I know that my sound mind makes better choices and creates better outcomes.

Worrying, agonizing, doomsday prophesying, dark fantasies, and other wild rides into the abyss of your creativity, negativity, and imagination do nothing but weaken you mentally, physically, and emotionally.

Hypervigilance and worrying do not stop events from happening in the future. They rob you of present joy, sap your mental capacity, drain you emotionally, and undermine your health with stress hormones.

To thrive in the face of challenge and go on to better days, you must assert authority over your inner world and all that you can control.

Mental discipline is key here. If you tend toward spiraling out of control, interrupt the pattern by taking your attention completely off of the crisis. You do have the power to do this. Do the breathing exercise at the top of this page. You cannot successfully do this exercise and continue to ruminate or analyze in your mind.

Remind yourself often that by remaining gripped by negative thoughts and imaginings you are reducing your ability to make good choices and handle challenges. Further, your upset doesn’t change the events at all.

It is as though you’ve shown up to a battle with an opponent you have a strong chance of defeating and instead of dealing with them, you attack yourself.

Don’t empower the challenge.

How did they do it? With extensive countermeasures such as free and quick testing, South Korea has slowed the spread of the virus and on March 14 reported more recoveries than new infections.

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BY TRACY MATSUE LOEFFELHOLZ MAR 16, 2020 (yesmagazine.org)

Yes, Covid-19 is serious, but context is key and the world is well placed to deal with it

Jon Henley @jonhenley

Wed 18 Mar 2020 06.57 EDT (theguardian.com)

The coronavirus epidemic plainly poses an exceptionally serious global problem: in a few short weeks, it has spread from China to more than 80 countries, infecting more than 100,000 people so far and causing more than 3,400 deaths.

But as we are hit with minute-by-minute updates from around the world, experiencing the advance of Covid-19 in real time – news alerts, huge headlines, social media hysteria – there’s a risk that we might lose some essential context.

Yes, this virus is obviously a massive challenge: medical, political and – perhaps most strikingly at present – social and economic. But it is worth remembering the world has never had better tools to fight it, and that if we are infected, we are unlikely to die from it.

Here, courtesy of a number of scientists but mainly Ignacio López-Goñi, a professor of microbiology and virology at the University of Navarra in Spain, are what might hopefully prove a few reassuring facts about the new coronavirus:

• We know what it is. As López-Goñi wrote for the Conversation France, the virus causing cases of severe pneumonia in Wuhan was identified within seven days of the official announcement on 31 December, and, three days after that, the gene sequence was available. HIV, by contrast, took two years to identify after it first appeared in mid-1981, López-Goni noted. We also know the virus is natural, that it is related to a virus found in bats, and that it can mutate, but does not appear to do so very often.
• We can test for it.By 13 January – three days after the gene sequence was published – a reliable test was available, developed by scientists at the department of virology at Berlin’s Charité university hospital with help from experts in Rotterdam, London and Hong Kong.
• We know it can be contained (albeit at considerable cost).China’s draconian quarantine and containment measures appear to be working. On Thursday 120 new cases were reported in Wuhan, the lowest figure for six weeks, and, for the first time since the start of the outbreak, none at all in the rest of Hubei province. Several Chinese provinces have had no new cases for a fortnight and more are reopening their schools. In many countries, infections are in defined clusters, which should allow them to be more readily contained.
• Catching it is not that easy (if we are careful) and we can kill it quite easily (provided we try). Frequent, careful hand washing, as we now all know, is the most effective way to stop the virus being transmitted, while a solution of ethanol, a solution of hydrogen peroxide or a solution of bleach will disinfect surfaces. To be considered at high risk of catching the coronavirus you need to live with, or have direct physical contact with, someone infected, be coughed or sneezed on by them (or pick up a used tissue), or be in face-to-face contact, within two metres, for more than 15 minutes. We’re not talking about passing someone in the street.

• In most cases, symptoms are mild, and young people are at very low risk.According to a study of 45,000 confirmed infections in China, 81% of cases caused only minor illness, 14% of patients had symptoms described as “severe”, and just 5% were considered “critical”, with about half of those resulting in death. Only 3% of cases concern people under 20, children seem barely affected by the virus at all, and the mortality rate for the under-40s is about 0.2%. The rate rises in the over-65s, reaching nearly 15% in the over-80s, especially those with pre-existing heart or lung conditions. Calculating mortality rates during an ongoing epidemic is hard because it is not clear how many mild or asymptomatic cases have been tested for, but the best estimate we have for the coronavirus so far is 1.4% – somewhere between 1918 Spanish flu and 2009 swine flu.
• People are recovering from it. As the daily count maintained by the Johns Hopkins CSSE shows, thousands of people around the world are making confirmed recoveries from the coronavirus every day.

• Hundreds of scientific articles have already been written about it. Type Covid-19 or Sars-19 into the search engine of the US national library of medicine’s PubMed website and you will find, barely five weeks after the emergence of the virus, 539 references to papers about it, dealing with vaccines, therapies, epidemiology, diagnosis and clinical practice. That’s an exponentially faster publication rate than during the Sars epidemic, López-Goñi notes – and most publications’ coronavirus articles are free to access.
• Vaccine prototypes exist. Commercial pharmaceutical and biotechnology labs such as Moderna, Inovio, Sanofi and Novavax, as well as academic groups such as one at the University of Queensland in Australia – many of which were already working on vaccines for similar Sars-related viruses – have preventive vaccine prototypes in development, some of which will soon be ready for human testing (although their efficacy and safety will of course take time to establish).
• Dozens of treatments are already being tested. By mid-February, more than 80 clinical trials were under way for antiviral treatments, according to Nature magazine, and most have already been used successfully in treating other illnesses. Drugs such as remdesivir (Ebola, Sars), chloroquine (malaria), lopinavir and ritonavir (HIV), and baricitinib (rheumatoid polyarthritis) are all being trialled on patients who have contracted the coronavirus, some as a result of the application of artificial intelligence.

• This article was amended on 7 March 2020. An earlier version wrongly stated that “a solution of ethanol, hydrogen peroxide and bleach will disinfect surfaces”. It is dangerous to combine such substances. It now states correctly that “a solution of ethanol, a solution of hydrogen peroxide or a solution of bleach” will disinfect surfaces.

New research shows a pattern of exoplanet sizes and spacing around other stars unlike what we see in our own system.

Scientific American|

• Lauren Weiss

Illustration by oorka / Getty Images.

How special is the solar system? The history of astronomy has mostly been a one-way journey from a worldview in which our solar system is orderly (and divine) to a view in which we are not special. Our solar system’s planets, once thought to dance in god-ordained perfect circles in a “music of the spheres,” deviate from circular orbits. Johannes Kepler, who demonstrated the non-circular orbits of the planets, tried to restore a sense of heavenliness by latching onto a new pattern for their orbits based on Plato’s mathematical solids—but that notion was discredited many years later with the discovery of Uranus.

So when, on a sunny afternoon in California in 2017, I discovered a set of patterns that seem to rule planetary systems other than our own, I was skeptical. Were these patterns real, or were they an illusion? And if real, what did they mean about our solar system’s place in the cosmos?

In addition to our solar system, we now know of over 400 multi-planet systems, thanks largely to the Kepler Mission. Kepler is a NASA spacecraft (named after the 17th century German astronomer) that was launched in 2009 for the sole purpose of discovering exoplanets—worlds orbiting other stars. It finds those exoplanets by continuously measuring the brightnesses of about 100,000 stars and waiting for the starlight from any of them dim ever so slightly due to the shadow of a planet in transit. The transit of each planet is unique, allowing the discovery of multiple planets orbiting the same star.

The pattern I found on that sunny afternoon: planets in the same system tend to be the same size. For example, if one planet is 1.5 times the radius of Earth, the other planets in the system are very likely to be 1.5 times the radius of Earth, plus or minus a little bit.

This is not at all what my colleagues and I expected. In our solar system, planets range from the size of Mercury (less than half the radius of Earth) to Jupiter (more than ten times the radius of Earth). The whole population of exoplanets discovered by Kepler ranges from one quarter the size of Earth to about twenty times the size of Earth. Yet, despite this wide range of possible sizes, planets tend to be about the same sizes as their neighbors. One of my collaborators decided they looked like “peas in a pod,” and that moniker became our shorthand for the pattern.

To test whether the peas-in-a-pod pattern was real, I concocted (on my laptop) imaginary planetary systems in which the sizes of planets orbiting a given star were random. Could some sort of bias in Kepler’s method of finding planets—which favors the detection of large planets close to their stars—contrive to make the planets in each of my imaginary systems appear to fit the pattern?

A representation of the planet sizes and spacings in each of the multi-planet systems with four or more planets from the California Kepler Survey, and our solar system (SOL). Each row represents a planetary system, with the star at the left (denoted by the Kepler Object-of-Interest name for the system), and planet orbital distance increasing to the right in astronomical units (AU). Credit: Lauren Weiss.

The answer was no: in more 1000 trials with randomly assigned planet sizes put through a virtual Kepler’s detection scheme, a pattern of similarly-sized planets in the same systems never emerged. This computational experiment did not reproduce what we observe in the Kepler planetary systems. Thus, the regular sizes of planets is a real astrophysical pattern.

In addition to having similar sizes, planets in these peas-in-a-pod-like systems also have regular orbital spacing. We found that the orbital distance between the first pair of planets is a good predictor of the orbital distance of the third planet, and the fourth, and so on. (Regular spacing also exists in our solar system out to Uranus and is called the Titius-Bode Law, but Neptune and Pluto do not follow the pattern). Furthermore, there is a link between the sizes of the planets and their spacing: the systems with the smallest planet sizes also have the closest orbital spacings.

What do these patterns mean? Planet formation is surely governed by the laws of physics, but we do not have a clear narrative of how these laws manifest in the messy environment of planetary birth. Theories of planet formation were mostly written before the discovery of the first exoplanet; their purpose was to explain the emergence of our own solar system from a disk of gas and dust. A widely accepted (but unconfirmed) theory about planet formation involves the rise of so-called “oligarchs,” young precursors of planets that each influence a swath of fixed width within the disk around the star. (Pluto is no longer considered a planet because Pluto was never big enough to be an oligarch.)

Oligarchic theory predicts roughly equal-mass oligarchs spaced at regular intervals, with the size of the oligarch dependent on the width of its influence. However, because our solar system is not a system of equal-mass planets at regular spacing, the rise of oligarchs is considered a mere chapter in our solar system’s history, an early pattern that was later overwritten by violent impacts that formed our very dissimilar terrestrial planets.

Yet hundreds of exoplanets exhibit a pattern that, in a qualitative sense, resembles our long-lost oligarchs. Perhaps the peas-in-a-pod are aged oligarchs. If so, how did they evade the violence that later shaped our solar system? We might find the answer, if we continue measuring the fundamental properties of the peas-in-a-pod planets. Or we might find additional planets in these systems that break from the pattern, just as the discovery of Uranus deviated from Kepler’s proposed pattern for the orbits in our solar system. Regardless, I think Kepler would be pleased to see that, thanks to a telescope bearing his name, we have discovered a pattern that pervades not just one, but hundreds of planetary systems.

Lauren Weiss, PhD, is the Parrent Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa. She lives in Honolulu, Hawai’i. You can find more of her writing on rockyworlds.wordpress.com.

Note: The author was the Trottier Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Université de Montréal when she performed the research described above, which has been refereed and published in the Astronomical Journal and is also publicly available on the ArXiv and in a press release. This research was conducted as part of the California Kepler Survey, which made use of data from the NASA Kepler Mission and from the W. M. Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, Hawai’i. The views expressed are those of the author(s) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

This article was originally published on October 16, 2018, by Scientific American, and is republished here with permission.

Here is detailed information on the class, this will be an exciting class so please plan to come and tell your friends who you think will be interested.  Thanks….

https://tinyurl.com/vtf7k5j
Photo Credit: LunarLanding | Gardens of Time | mcscrooge54

Text and info on the class…

At night, I like to say, that we’re all swimming in our subconscious mind when we dream. With Lucid Dreaming we bring the conscious mind to be aware that we’re dreaming (while we’re in the subconscious mind) and amazing things can happen. Come to class and learn the methods and process to become a Lucid Dreamer. 

Photo Credit: LunarLanding | Gardens of Time | mcscrooge54

Releasing the power of your Dreams

• Accelerate your personal Growth
• Understand the route to your conscious evolving
• Solve Problems
• Realize those “not so secret” messages in your unconscious.
• Gain ideas to help in waking life
• Turn up your creativity
• Learn to interpret your dreams
• Practice methods to remember dreams
• Review of the Latest scientific information on dreaming and health

Register now !   https://tinyurl.com/vtf7k5j
 

What you’ll receive with the Class

• 4 hour class delivered via an online webinar.
• Class Notes
• Workshop 
• Invitation to weekly Dream Group
• Dream interpretation session with HughJohn

Once you register you will be sent a Zoom meeting link to join. 

Register now !    https://tinyurl.com/vtf7k5j

More Info: https://theprosperos.org/events/event_202003081148

Please feel free to call or email me with any questions.

HughJohnM@gmail.com

310.899.9453

Thanks, HughJohn

We Look forward to having you in class.  Aloha!!!

—
Thanks,
HughJohn
310-899-9453

Matthew Stelzner Moon Mars Jupiter Saturn Pluto Conjunction This morning I recorded this video on the very rare 5 planet in Capricorn conjunction now in our sky. It’s the first day of the Bay Area “Shelter in Place” rules, and fortunately we’re still allowed to go outside and spend time in nature. We do not need to stay six feet away from trees, and so I went up the hill to pray and draw cards with the incredibly rare 5-planets-in-Capricorn conjunction (Moon-Mars-Jupiter-Saturn-Pluto). This kind of alignment only happens once in a thousand years, and I’m calling it the “Council of Elders Super Portal.” If you can get out in the two hours before dawn the next two mornings and pray for guidance, these planets will hold council with you. They wish to guide us through these times of crisis. Me and Lola send blessings and love from San Francisco. Stay safe everybody, and vote for candidates who fight for equality and health care for all. Love! ♥️✨????‍♂️?♥️ To explore more of my work and get information about my intuitive readings: Visit my website at stelz.biz If you sign up for my mailing list you will receive two free videos on tarot practice. Check out my series of forecast videos for 2020 at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…

By Jim Robbins

• July 14, 2012 (NYTimes.com)

THERE’S a term biologists and economists use these days — ecosystem services — which refers to the many ways nature supports the human endeavor. Forests filter the water we drink, for example, and birds and bees pollinate crops, both of which have substantial economic as well as biological value.

If we fail to understand and take care of the natural world, it can cause a breakdown of these systems and come back to haunt us in ways we know little about. A critical example is a developing model of infectious disease that shows that most epidemics — AIDS, Ebola, West Nile, SARS, Lyme disease and hundreds more that have occurred over the last several decades — don’t just happen. They are a result of things people do to nature.

Disease, it turns out, is largely an environmental issue. Sixty percent of emerging infectious diseases that affect humans are zoonotic — they originate in animals. And more than two-thirds of those originate in wildlife.

Teams of veterinarians and conservation biologists are in the midst of a global effort with medical doctors and epidemiologists to understand the “ecology of disease.” It is part of a project called Predict, which is financed by the United States Agency for International Development. Experts are trying to figure out, based on how people alter the landscape — with a new farm or road, for example — where the next diseases are likely to spill over into humans and how to spot them when they do emerge, before they can spread. They are gathering blood, saliva and other samples from high-risk wildlife species to create a library of viruses so that if one does infect humans, it can be more quickly identified. And they are studying ways of managing forests, wildlife and livestock to prevent diseases from leaving the woods and becoming the next pandemic.

It isn’t only a public health issue, but an economic one. The World Bank has estimated that a severe influenza pandemic, for example, could cost the world economy $3 trillion.

The problem is exacerbated by how livestock are kept in poor countries, which can magnify diseases borne by wild animals. A study released earlier this month by the International Livestock Research Institute found that more than two million people a year are killed by diseases that spread to humans from wild and domestic animals.

The Nipah virus in South Asia, and the closely related Hendra virus in Australia, both in the genus of henipah viruses, are the most urgent examples of how disrupting an ecosystem can cause disease. The viruses originated with flying foxes, Pteropus vampyrus, also known as fruit bats. They are messy eaters, no small matter in this scenario. They often hang upside down, looking like Dracula wrapped tightly in their membranous wings, and eat fruit by masticating the pulp and then spitting out the juices and seeds.

The bats have evolved with henipah over millions of years, and because of this co-evolution, they experience little more from it than the fruit bat equivalent of a cold. But once the virus breaks out of the bats and into species that haven’t evolved with it, a horror show can occur, as one did in 1999 in rural Malaysia. It is likely that a bat dropped a piece of chewed fruit into a piggery in a forest. The pigs became infected with the virus, and amplified it, and it jumped to humans. It was startling in its lethality. Out of 276 people infected in Malaysia, 106 died, and many others suffered permanent and crippling neurological disorders. There is no cure or vaccine. Since then there have been 12 smaller outbreaks in South Asia.

In Australia, where four people and dozens of horses have died of Hendra, the scenario was different: suburbanization lured infected bats that were once forest-dwellers into backyards and pastures. If a henipah virus evolves to be transmitted readily through casual contact, the concern is that it could leave the jungle and spread throughout Asia or the world. “Nipah is spilling over, and we are observing these small clusters of cases — and it’s a matter of time that the right strain will come along and efficiently spread among people,” says Jonathan Epstein, a veterinarian with EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based organization that studies the ecological causes of disease.

That’s why experts say it’s critical to understand underlying causes. “Any emerging disease in the last 30 or 40 years has come about as a result of encroachment into wild lands and changes in demography,” says Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist and the president of EcoHealth.

Emerging infectious diseases are either new types of pathogens or old ones that have mutated to become novel, as the flu does every year. AIDS, for example, crossed into humans from chimpanzees in the 1920s when bush-meat hunters in Africa killed and butchered them.

Diseases have always come out of the woods and wildlife and found their way into human populations — the plague and malaria are two examples. But emerging diseases have quadrupled in the last half-century, experts say, largely because of increasing human encroachment into habitat, especially in disease “hot spots” around the globe, mostly in tropical regions. And with modern air travel and a robust market in wildlife trafficking, the potential for a serious outbreak in large population centers is enormous.

The key to forecasting and preventing the next pandemic, experts say, is understanding what they call the “protective effects” of nature intact. In the Amazon, for example, one study showed an increase in deforestation by some 4 percent increased the incidence of malaria by nearly 50 percent, because mosquitoes, which transmit the disease, thrive in the right mix of sunlight and water in recently deforested areas. Developing the forest in the wrong way can be like opening Pandora’s box. These are the kinds of connections the new teams are unraveling.

Public health experts have begun to factor ecology into their models. Australia, for example, has just announced a multimillion-dollar effort to understand the ecology of the Hendra virus and bats.

IT’S not just the invasion of intact tropical landscapes that can cause disease. The West Nile virus came to the United States from Africa but spread here because one of its favored hosts is the American robin, which thrives in a world of lawns and agricultural fields. And mosquitoes, which spread the disease, find robins especially appealing. “The virus has had an important impact on human health in the United States because it took advantage of species that do well around people,” says Marm Kilpatrick, a biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The pivotal role of the robin in West Nile has earned it the title “super spreader.”

And Lyme disease, the East Coast scourge, is very much a product of human changes to the environment: the reduction and fragmentation of large contiguous forests. Development chased off predators — wolves, foxes, owls and hawks. That has resulted in a fivefold increase in white-footed mice, which are great “reservoirs” for the Lyme bacteria, probably because they have poor immune systems. And they are terrible groomers. When possums or gray squirrels groom, they remove 90 percent of the larval ticks that spread the disease, while mice kill just half. “So mice are producing huge numbers of infected nymphs,” says the Lyme disease researcher Richard Ostfeld.

“When we do things in an ecosystem that erode biodiversity — we chop forests into bits or replace habitat with agricultural fields — we tend to get rid of species that serve a protective role,” Dr. Ostfeld told me. “There are a few species that are reservoirs and a lot of species that are not. The ones we encourage are the ones that play reservoir roles.”

Dr. Ostfeld has seen two emerging diseases — babesiosis and anaplasmosis — that affect humans in the ticks he studies, and he has raised the alarm about the possibility of their spread.

The best way to prevent the next outbreak in humans, specialists say, is with what they call the One Health Initiative — a worldwide program, involving more than 600 scientists and other professionals, that advances the idea that human, animal and ecological health are inextricably linked and need to be studied and managed holistically.

“It’s not about keeping pristine forest pristine and free of people,” says Simon Anthony, a molecular virologist at the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “It’s learning how to do things sustainably. If you can get a handle on what it is that drives the emergence of a disease, then you can learn to modify environments sustainably.”

The scope of the problem is huge and complex. Just an estimated 1 percent of wildlife viruses are known. Another major factor is the immunology of wildlife, a science in its infancy. Raina K. Plowright, a biologist at Pennsylvania State University who studies the ecology of disease, found that outbreaks of the Hendra virus in flying foxes in rural areas were rare but were much higher in urban and suburban animals. She hypothesizes that urbanized bats are sedentary and miss the frequent exposure to the virus they used to get in the wild, which kept the infection at low levels. That means more bats — whether from poor nutrition, loss of habitat or other factors — become infected and shed more of the virus into backyards.

THE fate of the next pandemic may be riding on the work of Predict. EcoHealth and its partners — the University of California at Davis, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Smithsonian Institution and Global Viral Forecasting — are looking at wildlife-borne viruses across the tropics, building a virus library. Most of the work focuses on primates, rats and bats, which are most likely to carry diseases that affect people.

Most critically, Predict researchers are watching the interface where deadly viruses are known to exist and where people are breaking open the forest, as they are along the new highway from the Atlantic to the Pacific across the Andes in Brazil and Peru. “By mapping encroachment into the forest you can predict where the next disease could emerge,” Dr. Daszak, EcoHealth’s president, says. “So we’re going to the edge of villages, we’re going to places where mines have just opened up, areas where new roads are being built. We are going to talk to people who live within these zones and saying, ‘what you are doing is potentially a risk.’ ”

It might mean talking to people about how they butcher and eat bush meat or to those who are building a feed lot in bat habitat. In Bangladesh, where Nipah broke out several times, the disease was traced to bats that were raiding containers that collected date palm sap, which people drank. The disease source was eliminated by placing bamboo screens (which cost 8 cents each) over the collectors.

EcoHealth also scans luggage and packages at airports, looking for imported wildlife likely to be carrying deadly viruses. And they have a program called PetWatch to warn consumers about exotic pets that are pulled out of the forest in disease hot spots and shipped to market.

All in all, the knowledge gained in the last couple of years about emerging diseases should allow us to sleep a little easier, says Dr. Epstein, the EcoHealth veterinarian. “For the first time,” he said, “there is a coordinated effort in 20 countries to develop an early warning system for emerging zoonotic outbreaks.”Correction: July 22, 2012

An earlier version of this article described imprecisely the affiliation of Simon Anthony, a molecular virologist. While he works with EcoHealth, an organization of scientists devoted to wildlife conservation, his primary affiliation is as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

Jim Robbins is a frequent contributor to the Science section of The New York Times.A version of this article appears in print on July 15, 2012, Section SR, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Man-Made Epidemics. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

(Contributed by Richard Burns, H.W., M.)

Americans are waking up to a country on virtual lockdown — empty streets, closed businesses — as confirmed cases of the new coronavirus are on the rise.

Wednesday, March 18, 2020 5:10AM (6abc.com)

Nearly four months after the first cases of COVID-19 were discovered in Wuhan, the Chinese city has reported just one new case for the second day straight.

Wuhan and the surrounding Hubai providence confirmed only one new case of the new coronavirus Monday and Tuesday, China’s National Health Commission reported.

Overall, the Chinese mainland has reported 80,894 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 3,237 deaths, but since, the number of new cases has dwindled, and more than 65,000 people recovered from the virus.

RELATED: More than 70% of COVID-19 patients in China have recovered, been discharged

Meanwhile, every single European country has confirmed at least one case of the new coronavirus disease. Before confirming its first two cases Tuesday night, Montenegro was the only European country without a single confirmed case of COVID-19.

The patients are both women — one is in her late 40s and the other is in her early 70s — and one had recently returned from Spain, ABC News reported.

The World Health Organization called Europe the epicenter of the pandemic. Italy now has 31,500 confirmed cases and more than 2,500 deaths.

Dr. Mike Ryan, the World Health Organization’s emergencies chief, said it can take up to six weeks for people to fully recover from COVID-19 infections, which could include pneumonia and other respiratory problems in serious cases. He said the numbers of reported patients have not always been systematically provided to World Health Organization although the U.N. health agency is asking every country with cases for further information.

The Associated Press and ABC News contributed to this report.

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