CLEARLAKE, Calif. – The Clearlake City Council will hold a special Monday meeting to discuss the purchase of new radios for the police department and the sale of a city property.
The council meeting will convene at 11 a.m. Monday, Nov. 9.
Because of the county’s shelter in place order, Clearlake City Hall remains closed to the public, however, the virtual meeting will be broadcast live on the city's YouTube channel or the Lake County PEG TV YouTube Channel. Community members also can participate via Zoom.
Comments and questions can be submitted in writing for City Council consideration by sending them to Administrative Services Director/City Clerk Melissa Swanson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. You can also visit the city’s town hall site and submit written comments at https://www.opentownhall.com/portals/327/forum_home. Identify the subject you wish to comment on in your email’s subject line or in your town hall submission.
To give the council adequate time to review your questions and comments, please submit your written comments prior to 10 a.m. on Monday, Nov. 9.
On the agenda is a request from Police Chief Andrew White to purchase 42 mobile and six portable radios, with accessories, from Command Communications in an amount not to exceed $47,175. Staff also is seeking authorization to trade-in the mobile radios being replaced.
Also on the agenda is consideration of the sale of city-owned property at 15886 18th Ave.
City Manager Alan Flora’s report to the council explained that in 2018 the city was deeded a 1,022-square-foot, two-bedroom, one-bath single-family dwelling with an attached garage on 18th Avenue due to a default on a Community Development Block Grant Home Rehabilitation loan by the homeowner.
The original loan amount was $117,000 at 3 percent interest which would have matured in 2023, Flora said.
Flora said staff placed the home up for sale on the open real estate market and received several offers.
“The proposed sale price is $130,000, recouping the City’s loan funds that were previously Defaulted,” Flora said in his report.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – One of the treasures and pleasures of taking a walkabout in Lake County is that no two days are alike.
One morning I was on a pelican hunt. As I made my way along the tree-lined boardwalk at Clear Lake State Park the fermented scents of decaying leaves and lively algae guided my walk. The sensuous surroundings nourish me.
I spied an enormous squadron of American white pelicans floating like bright, white living angles between Clear Lake State Park and Lakeside Park, but alas, they were out of reach of my camera lens.
So I thought, wait! I can hear the distinctive calls of red-winged blackbirds singing in the swaying reeds along the lakeshore, and I would love to capture them on camera.
As I stood by the still lakeshore an American mink silently swam across the beach, directly in front of me!
Lake County is full-to-the-brim with a wide variety of mammal species like elk, coyote, bear, fox, deer, raccoon and more. Most are secretive and not easy to spy, and the American mink is no exception.
Related to ferrets, these elongated creatures thrive in areas near water and wetlands, making their meal choices of amphibians, fish and crustaceans readily available. American mink have also been known to consume gulls and cormorants by first drowning them.
Other carnivorous relations to the mink are river otters, which are larger, weighing in at up to 30-odd pounds and possess a streamlined tail, while American mink are cat-like in size and weigh around 2 to 4 pounds.
Mink's predators include great horned owls, bobcats, coyotes and foxes.
American mink wear dense fur coats that are sprigged with greasy guard-hairs that provide waterproofing.
Minks were avidly hunted in the 19th century when their thick pelts were used for fur coats. In some places, such as the Pacific Northwest they are still hunted.
Around 1960 scientists made a study of minks, along with ferrets, cats and skunks to determine behavior characteristics, and they found that minks were able to surpass the other critters in identifying objects and select them from memory. Who knew slinky minks were so intelligent?
Kathleen Scavone, M.A., is a retired educator, potter, freelance writer and author of “Anderson Marsh State Historic Park: A Walking History, Prehistory, Flora, and Fauna Tour of a California State Park” and “Native Americans of Lake County.”
Since astronomers confirmed the presence of planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets, humanity has wondered how many could harbor life. Now, we’re one step closer to finding an answer. According to new research using data from NASA’s retired planet-hunting mission, the Kepler space telescope, about half the stars similar in temperature to our Sun could have a rocky planet capable of supporting liquid water on its surface.
Our galaxy holds at least an estimated 300 million of these potentially habitable worlds, based on even the most conservative interpretation of the results in a study released today and to be published in The Astronomical Journal.
Some of these exoplanets could even be our interstellar neighbors, with at least four potentially within 30 light-years of our Sun and the closest likely to be at most about 20 light-years from us.
These are the minimum numbers of such planets based on the most conservative estimate that 7 percent of Sun-like stars host such worlds. However, at the average expected rate of 50 percent, there could be many more.
This research helps us understand the potential for these planets to have the elements to support life. This is an essential part of astrobiology, the study of life’s origins and future in our universe.
The study is authored by NASA scientists who worked on the Kepler mission alongside collaborators from around the world. NASA retired the space telescope in 2018 after it ran out of fuel. Nine years of the telescope’s observations revealed that there are billions of planets in our galaxy – more planets than stars.
"Kepler already told us there were billions of planets, but now we know a good chunk of those planets might be rocky and habitable," said the lead author Steve Bryson, a researcher at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. "Though this result is far from a final value, and water on a planet's surface is only one of many factors to support life, it's extremely exciting that we calculated these worlds are this common with such high confidence and precision."
For the purposes of calculating this occurrence rate, the team looked at exoplanets between a radius of 0.5 and 1.5 times that of Earth's, narrowing in on planets that are most likely rocky. They also focused on stars similar to our Sun in age and temperature, plus or minus up to 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit.
That's a wide range of different stars, each with its own particular properties impacting whether the rocky planets in its orbit are capable of supporting liquid water.
These complexities are partly why it is so difficult to calculate how many potentially habitable planets are out there, especially when even our most powerful telescopes can just barely detect these small planets. That's why the research team took a new approach.
Rethinking how to identify habitability
This new finding is a significant step forward in Kepler's original mission to understand how many potentially habitable worlds exist in our galaxy.
Previous estimates of the frequency, also known as the occurrence rate, of such planets ignored the relationship between the star's temperature and the kinds of light given off by the star and absorbed by the planet.
The new analysis accounts for these relationships, and provides a more complete understanding of whether or not a given planet might be capable of supporting liquid water, and potentially life.
That approach is made possible by combining Kepler's final dataset of planetary signals with data about each star's energy output from an extensive trove of data from the European Space Agency's Gaia mission.
"We always knew defining habitability simply in terms of a planet's physical distance from a star, so that it's not too hot or cold, left us making a lot of assumptions," said Ravi Kopparapu, an author on the paper and a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "Gaia's data on stars allowed us to look at these planets and their stars in an entirely new way."
Gaia provided information about the amount of energy that falls on a planet from its host star based on a star's flux, or the total amount of energy that is emitted in a certain area over a certain time. This allowed the researchers to approach their analysis in a way that acknowledged the diversity of the stars and solar systems in our galaxy.
"Not every star is alike," said Kopparapu. "And neither is every planet."
Though the exact effect is still being researched, a planet's atmosphere figures into how much light is needed to allow liquid water on a planet's surface as well.
Using a conservative estimate of the atmosphere's effect, the researchers estimated an occurrence rate of about 50 percent – that is, about half of Sun-like stars have rocky planets capable of hosting liquid water on their surfaces. An alternative optimistic definition of the habitable zone estimates about 75 percent.
Kepler's legacy charts future research
This result builds upon a long legacy of work of analyzing Kepler data to obtain an occurrence rate and sets the stage for future exoplanet observations informed by how common we now expect these rocky, potentially habitable worlds to be.
Future research will continue to refine the rate, informing the likelihood of finding these kinds of planets and feeding into plans for the next stages of exoplanet research, including future telescopes.
"Knowing how common different kinds of planets are is extremely valuable for the design of upcoming exoplanet-finding missions," said co-author Michelle Kunimoto, who worked on this paper after finishing her doctorate on exoplanet occurrence rates at the University of British Columbia, and recently joined the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "Surveys aimed at small, potentially habitable planets around Sun-like stars will depend on results like these to maximize their chance of success."
After revealing more than 2,800 confirmed planets outside our solar system, the data collected by the Kepler space telescope continues to yield important new discoveries about our place in the universe.
Though Kepler's field of view covered only 0.25 percent of the sky, the area that would be covered by your hand if you held it up at arm's length towards the sky, its data has allowed scientists to extrapolate what the mission's data means for the rest of the galaxy. That work continues with TESS, NASA's current planet hunting telescope.
"To me, this result is an example of how much we've been able to discover just with that small glimpse beyond our solar system," said Bryson. "What we see is that our galaxy is a fascinating one, with fascinating worlds, and some that may not be too different from our own."
Frank Tavares works for NASA's Ames Research Center.
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA – Cooler temperatures and the continued hard work of crews on the fire lines have raised containment on the August Complex South Zone.
The US Forest Service said Sunday that crews on the South Zone of the August Complex completed an additional 6.7 miles of fireline repair Saturday.
This effort combined with recent precipitation contributed to an increase in containment on the 499,827-acre South Zone to 99 percent.
The complex as a whole remained at 1,032,648 acres and 96 percent containment on Sunday, officials said.
It began on Aug. 16 and 17 due to lightning. It’s burning on the Mendocino, Six Rivers and Shasta-Trinity National Forests.
The Forest Service said crews continued fire suppression repair operations around the M4 and M2 roads, Gloyd Slide, Mill Creek and Mendocino Pass.
Rehabilitation work included obliterating berms, providing drainage to prevent erosion, stabilizing landslide-prone areas and repairing roads damaged during suppression activities, officials said.
In addition, the Forest Service said crews completed repair of the Oak Flat Campground, which was used by crews as a spike camp, and it is reopened to the public.
The transition of command of the South Zone to the Mendocino National Forest district fire managers is scheduled for Monday, the Forest Service said.
The Forest Service said fire suppression repair work is slated to continue until winter weather prevents operations.
The entire August Complex is expected by the Forest Service to be fully contained on Dec. 15.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – While its main fundraiser was canceled this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Lake County Land Trust is hard at work creating plans for its two recently acquired properties.
The Lake County Land Trust was created over a quarter of a century ago to preserve and protect the beautiful natural areas in Lake County.
Since its inception, this nonprofit charitable organization has been successful in preserving hundreds of acres of biodiverse habitat for the benefit of all.
The Land Trust owns four properties and three conservation easements, and together with the Nature Conservancy manages the Boggs Lake Preserve on Mt. Hannah.
The group’s most recent acquisition, funded by the State’s Wildlife Conservation Board and donors, is a 200-acre parcel which is part of the Land Trust’s Big Valley Wetlands Preservation Project along the shores of Clear Lake.
The Wright property purchase was the Land Trust’s biggest property acquisition to date.
“These acquisitions are only made possible with community support,” said Land Trust Board President Val Nixon. “Thanks to the combined efforts of many, this diverse wetland habitat is now protected forever.”
Owning properties, however, requires much more than the purchase of land. Following a successful acquisition, a plan must be created for public use. In the long-term, that plan must be implemented and the property must be managed.
The Land Trust’s two-fold goal is to protect land for its biodiverse value and scenic beauty while encouraging people to enjoy the land, inspiring them to live in balance with nature.
Currently, two of the trust’s properties are open for public enjoyment: Rabbit Hill in Middletown and Boggs Lake Preserve near Cobb.
The Land Trust Board, staff and volunteers are now creating management and public access plans for its two recent acquisitions, the 200-acre Wright property and the Melo property, both located within the Big Valley Wetlands.
The Land Trust first inventories plants and animals, identifying threatened or endangered species. Time is spent eradicating invasive species. Signs are created, identifying the land’s status as protected by the Land Trust. Properties are cleaned of all trash, fences and gates are repaired, and hiking paths are created.
This initial cleanup then transitions into regular maintenance that is in accordance with a fire protection and resilience plan: continual weeding out of invasive species, management of buildings and structures to ensure stability and longevity, and regular mowing of hiking paths to keep them user-friendly. Mitigation and rehabilitation to alleviate wildfire or heavy rain damage are often required.
Surveys are conducted regularly, using both GIS technology and on-site personal observation to ensure that grounds are safe and well-managed.
Trails are developed throughout the landscape and dotted with thoughtful educational panels that interpret the natural world in ways that bring it to life, encouraging respect for the natural surroundings. Resting places, picnic tables, shade structures and gates are introduced in the least disruptive way possible.
Structured field trips and standalone educational programs are offered to students, nature days and guided hikes occur on a schedule, and fundraisers are hosted to raise money for all of the above.
This year the Land Trust’s main fundraiser, its annual Dinner with Direction, has been canceled due to the pandemic.
The Lake County Land Trust envisions a bright future where its properties are places of inspiration and education, where curiosity about the natural world is ignited, galvanizing people to care for nature as nature cares for all who inhabit this world.
Based on those studies, Caltrans said it is developing a project “that may include improved sidewalks, crosswalks and bikeways on Highway 20 throughout Lucerne from the Morrison Creek Bridge to Country Club Drive.”
A project initiation document is Caltrans’ first step in seeking funding for a project.
While funding so far hasn’t been identified, “We intend to partner with the Lake Area Planning Council to pursue funding through the Active Transportation Program or other funding opportunities that may arise,” Kelso told Lake County News.
With the project now in its preliminary stage, Caltrans wants community input on project concepts so it can design facilities that work well for all road users.
Kelso said the survey was developed to get more specific design-related feedback from the public than what the planning studies provided.
“Responses will help Caltrans scope a project that increases people’s safety and comfort in walking and bicycling in Lucerne,” Kelso said.
For more information or to offer additional comments, contact Alexis Kelso at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or 707-498-0536.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
NORTH COAST, Calif. – Mendocino County Superior Court Presiding Judge Ann Moorman issued an emergency order Sunday closing that county’s courts this week due to COVID-19-related incidents within the court operations.
Courts in Ukiah and Fort Bragg will be closed Monday through Friday, officials said.
Individuals with court dates this week should call their attorney for further information and direction.
District Attorney David Eyster said his office operations including the Victim/Witness offices in Ukiah and Fort Bragg will remain open as much as possible during the week-long court closure.
Because the public entrances to the main courthouse in Ukiah and the Fort Bragg course will be closed by order of Judge Moorman, anybody with urgent business with the DA or his staff should call the DA's main reception in Ukiah at 707-463-4211 and schedule an appointment time, to include an escort into the DA's offices, if appropriate.
For more information visit the Mendocino County Superior Court’s website.
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Lake County Animal Care and Control has several new dogs it’s ready to adopt out this week.
Dogs available for adoption this week include mixes of border collie, Chihuahua, German Shepherd, husky, Labrador Retriever, pit bull, Rhodesian Ridgeback and Shar Pei.
Dogs that are adopted from Lake County Animal Care and Control are either neutered or spayed, microchipped and, if old enough, given a rabies shot and county license before being released to their new owner. License fees do not apply to residents of the cities of Lakeport or Clearlake.
The following dogs at the Lake County Animal Care and Control shelter have been cleared for adoption (additional dogs on the animal control Web site not listed are still “on hold”).
This male Shar Pei-Rhodesian Ridgeback has a short brown and black coat.
He is in kennel No. 19, ID No. 14132.
Yellow Labrador Retriever
This male yellow Labrador Retriever has a short coat.
He is in kennel No. 20, ID No. 14156.
Male Chihuahua
This male Chihuahua has a short black and brown coat.
He has been neutered.
He’s in kennel No. 21, ID No. 13638.
Male border collie
This male border collie has a long black and white coat.
He has been neutered.
He’s in kennel No. 22, ID No. 14150.
Male German Shepherd
This male German Shepherd has a medium-length black and tan coat.
He is in kennel No. 23, ID No. 14154.
Male German Shepherd-Siberian Husky
This Male German Shepherd-Siberian Husky has a medium-length black and tan coat.
He is in kennel No. 25, ID No. 14135.
Male pit bull terrier
This male pit bull terrier has a short gray and brindle coat.
He is in kennel No. 26, ID No. 14138.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.
As states continue to count their ballots in the 2020 election, it seems possible that Democrats and Republicans will end up in court over whether President Trump will win a second term in the White House.
Should either Trump or Biden refuse to concede, it wouldn’t be the first time turmoil and claims of fraud dominated the days and weeks after the elections.
The elections of 1876, 1888, 1960 and 2000 were among the most contentious in American history. In each case, the losing candidate and party dealt with the disputed results differently.
1876: A compromise that came at a price
By 1876 – 11 years after the end of the Civil War – all the Confederate states had been readmitted to the Union, and Reconstruction was in full swing. The Republicans were strongest in the pro-Union areas of the North and African-American regions of the South, while Democratic support coalesced around southern whites and northern areas that had been less supportive of the Civil War. That year, Republicans nominated Ohio Gov. Rutherford B. Hayes, and Democrats chose New York Gov. Samuel Tilden.
But on Election Day, there was widespread voter intimidation against African-American Republican voters throughout the South. Three of those Southern states – Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina – had Republican-dominated election boards. In those three states, some initial results seemed to indicate Tilden victories. But due to widespread allegations of intimidation and fraud, the election boards invalidated enough votes to give the states – and their electoral votes – to Hayes. With the electoral votes from all three states, Hayes would win a 185-184 majority in the Electoral College.
Competing sets of election returns and electoral votes were sent to Congress to be counted in January 1877, so Congress voted to create a bipartisan commission of 15 members of Congress and Supreme Court justices to determine how to allocate the electors from the three disputed states. Seven commissioners were to be Republican, seven were to be Democrats, and there would be one independent, Justice David Davis of Illinois.
But in a political scheme that backfired, Davis was chosen by Democrats in the Illinois state legislature to serve in the U.S. Senate. (Senators weren’t chosen by voters until 1913.) They’d hoped to win his support on the electoral commission. Instead, Davis resigned from the commission and was replaced by Republican Justice Joseph Bradley, who proceeded to join an 8-7 Republican majority that awarded all the disputed electoral votes to Hayes.
Democrats decided not to argue with that final result due to the “Compromise of 1877,” in which Republicans, in return for getting Hayes in the White House, agreed to an end to Reconstruction and military occupation of the South.
Hayes had an ineffective, one-term presidency, while the compromise ended up destroying any semblance of African-American political clout in the South. For the next century, southern legislatures, free from northern supervision, would implement laws discriminating against blacks and restricting their ability to vote.
1888: Bribing blocks of five
In 1888, Democratic President Grover Cleveland of New York ran for reelection against former Indiana U.S. Sen. Benjamin Harrison.
Back then, election ballots in most states were printed, distributed by political parties and cast publicly. Certain voters, known as “floaters,” were known to sell their votes to willing buyers.
Harrison had appointed an Indiana lawyer, William Wade Dudley, as treasurer of the Republican National Committee. Shortly before the election, Dudley sent a letter to Republican local leaders in Indiana with promised funds and instructions for how to divide receptive voters into “blocks of five” to receive bribes in exchange for voting the Republican ticket. The instructions outlined how each Republican activist would be responsible for five of these “floaters.”
Democrats got a copy of the letter and publicized it widely in the days leading up to the election. Harrison ended up winning Indiana by only about 2,000 votes but still would have won in the Electoral College without the state.
Cleveland actually won the national popular vote by almost 100,000 votes. But he lost his home state, New York, by about 1 percent of the vote, putting Harrison over the top in the Electoral College. Cleveland’s loss in New York may have also been related to vote-buying schemes.
Cleveland did not contest the Electoral College outcome and won a rematch against Harrison four years later, becoming the only president to serve nonconsecutive terms of office. Meanwhile, the blocks-of-five scandal led to the nationwide adoption of secret ballots for voting.
1960: Did the Daley machine deliver?
The 1960 election pitted Republican Vice President Richard Nixon against Democratic U.S. Sen. John F. Kennedy.
The popular vote was the closest of the 20th century, with Kennedy defeating Nixon by only about 100,000 votes – a less than 0.2 percent difference.
Because of that national spread – and because Kennedy officially defeated Nixon by less than 1 percent in five states (Hawaii, Illinois, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico) and less than 2 percent in Texas – many Republicans cried foul. They fixated on two places in particular – southern Texas and Chicago, where a political machine led by Mayor Richard Daley allegedly churned out just enough votes to give Kennedy the state of Illinois. If Nixon had won Texas and Illinois, he would have had an Electoral College majority.
While Republican-leaning newspapers proceeded to investigate and conclude that voter fraud had occurred in both states, Nixon did not contest the results. Following the example of Cleveland in 1892, Nixon ran for president again in 1968 and won.
2000: The hanging chads
In 2000, many states were still using the punch card ballot, a voting system created in the 1960s. Even though these ballots had a long history of machine malfunctions and missed votes, no one seemed to know or care – until all Americans suddenly realized that the outdated technology had created a problem in Florida.
Then, on Election Day, the national media discovered that a “butterfly ballot,” a punch card ballot with a design that violated Florida state law, had confused thousands of voters in Palm Beach County.
Many who had thought they were voting for Gore unknowingly voted for another candidate or voted for two candidates. (For example, Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan received about 3,000 votes from voters who had probably intended to vote for Gore.) Gore ended up losing the state to Bush by 537 votes – and, in losing Florida, lost the election.
But ultimately, the month-long process to determine the winner of the presidential election came down to an issue of “hanging chads.”
Over 60,000 ballots in Florida, most of them on punch cards, had registered no vote for president on the punch card readers. But on many of the punch cards, the little pieces of paper that get punched out when someone votes – known as chads – were still hanging by one, two or three corners and had gone uncounted. Gore went to court to have those ballots counted by hand to try to determine voter intent, as allowed by state law. Bush fought Gore’s request in court. While Gore won in the Florida State Supreme Court, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled at 10 p.m. on Dec. 12 that Congress had set a deadline of that date for states to choose electors, so there was no more time to count votes.
The national drama and trauma that followed Election Day in 1876 and 2000 could be repeated this year. Of course, a lot will depend on the margins and how the candidates react.
Most eyes will be on Trump, who hasn’t said whether or not he’ll accept the result if he loses. On election night, he announced he had won before all the votes had been counted in a number of battleground states.
This is an updated version of an article originally published on Nov. 1, 2016.
In the early days of the pandemic, many people hoped the coronavirus would simply fade away. Some argued that it would disappear on its ownwith the summer heat. Others claimed that herd immunity would kick in once enough people had been infected. But none of that has happened.
A combination of public health efforts to contain and mitigate the pandemic – from rigorous testing and contact tracing to social distancing and wearing masks – have been proven to help. Given that the virus has spread almost everywhere in the world, though, such measures alone can’t bring the pandemic to an end. All eyes are now turned to vaccine development, which is being pursued at unprecedented speed.
Yet experts tell us that even with a successful vaccine and effective treatment, COVID-19 may never go away. Even if the pandemic is curbed in one part of the world, it will likely continue in other places, causing infections elsewhere. And even if it is no longer an immediate pandemic-level threat, the coronavirus will likely become endemic – meaning slow, sustained transmission will persist. The coronavirus will continue to cause smaller outbreaks, much like seasonal flu.
The history of pandemics is full of such frustrating examples.
Once they emerge, diseases rarely leave
Whether bacterial, viral or parasitic, virtually every disease pathogen that has affected people over the last several thousand years is still with us, because it is nearly impossible to fully eradicate them.
The only disease that has been eradicated through vaccination is smallpox. Mass vaccination campaigns led by the World Health Organization in the 1960s and 1970s were successful, and in 1980, smallpox was declared the first – and still, the only – human disease to be fully eradicated.
So success stories like smallpox are exceptional. It is rather the rule that diseases come to stay.
Take, for example, pathogens like malaria. Transmitted via parasite, it’s almost as old as humanity and still exacts a heavy disease burden today: There were about 228 million malaria cases and 405,000 deaths worldwide in 2018. Since 1955, global programs to eradicate malaria, assisted by the use of DDT and chloroquine, brought some success, but the disease is still endemic in many countries of the Global South.
Add to this mix relatively younger pathogens, such as HIV and Ebola virus, along with influenza and coronaviruses including SARS, MERS and SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19, and the overall epidemiological picture becomes clear. Research on the global burden of disease finds that annual mortality caused by infectious diseases – most of which occurs in the developing world – is nearly one-third of all deaths globally.
Today, in an age of global air travel, climate change and ecological disturbances, we are constantly exposed to the threat of emerging infectious diseases while continuing to suffer from much older diseases that remain alive and well.
Once added to the repertoire of pathogens that affect human societies, most infectious diseases are here to stay.
Plague caused past pandemics – and still pops up
Even infections that now have effective vaccines and treatments continue to take lives. Perhaps no disease can help illustrate this point better than plague, the single most deadly infectious disease in human history. Its name continues to be synonymous with horror even today.
Plague is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. There have been countless local outbreaks and at least three documented plague pandemics over the last 5,000 years, killing hundreds of millions of people. The most notorious of all pandemics was the Black Death of the mid-14th century.
Yet the Black Death was far from being an isolated outburst. Plague returned every decade or even more frequently, each time hitting already weakened societies and taking its toll during at least six centuries. Even before the sanitary revolution of the 19th century, each outbreak gradually died down over the course of months and sometimes years as a result of changes in temperature, humidity and the availability of hosts, vectors and a sufficient number of susceptible individuals.
Some societies recovered relatively quickly from their losses caused by the Black Death. Others never did. For example, medieval Egypt could not fully recover from the lingering effects of the pandemic, which particularly devastated its agricultural sector. The cumulative effects of declining populations became impossible to recoup. It led to the gradual decline of the Mamluk Sultanate and its conquest by the Ottomans within less than two centuries.
That very same state-wrecking plague bacterium remains with us even today, a reminder of the very long persistence and resilience of pathogens.
Hopefully COVID-19 will not persist for millennia. But until there’s a successful vaccine, and likely even after, no one is safe. Politics here are crucial: When vaccination programs are weakened, infections can come roaring back. Just look at measles and polio, which resurge as soon as vaccination efforts falter.
Given such historical and contemporary precedents, humanity can only hope that the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 will prove to be a tractable and eradicable pathogen. But the history of pandemics teaches us to expect otherwise.
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA – The US Forest Service said the cooler weather that’s arrived over the region is impacting operations on the South Zone of the August Complex.
The complex, started by lightning on Aug. 16 and 17, has remained at 1,032,648 acres for more than two weeks, with containment now at 96 percent.
The South Zone, the portion that includes northern Lake County and the Mendocino National Forest, is at 499,826 acres and 97 percent containment, according to the Forest Service.
This new weather pattern follows a month of unseasonably warm conditions, officials said.
The Forest Service said the temperature dropped 30 degrees overnight on Thursday at Mendocino Pass with a dusting of snow.
There are 688 personnel on the incident as a whole and 260 personnel working on the August South Zone Complex, the Forest Service said.
Crews are continuing to focus on fire suppression repair in priority areas around the Sanhedrin Wilderness, wild and scenic river corridors, Mill Creek, Eel River and in locations that are prone to landslides along key forest travel routes. On Thursday alone, crews completed six and a half miles of suppression repair.
Forest Highway 7 remains closed to public traffic from Willows to Covelo, the Forest Service said.
CLEARLAKE, Calif. – Clearlake Animal Control has seven dogs waiting for their new families.
The following dogs are ready for adoption or foster.
‘Banjo’
“Banjo” is a male American Staffordshire Terrier mix with a short tan and white coat.
He is dog No. 4267.
‘Bella’
“Bella” is a female American Bully mix.
She has a short beige and tan coat.
She is dog No. 3537.
‘Carusoe’
“Carusoe’ is a small male adult German Shepherd mix.
He has a short tan and black coat.
He is dog No. 4297.
‘Chex’
“Chex” is a male adult terrier with a short brindle and white coat.
He is dog No. 4341.
‘Inky’
“Inky” is a male German Shepherd mix.
He has a long smooth black coat.
He is dog No. 4324.
‘Jack’
“Jack” is a male Labrador Retriever mix with a short yellow coat.
He is dog No. 4155.
‘Orrie’
“Orrie” is a male German Shepherd mix.
He has a short tan and black coat.
He is dog No. 4342.
The shelter is open by appointment only due to COVID-19.
Call the Clearlake Animal Control shelter at 707-273-9440, or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to inquire about adoptions and schedule a visit to the shelter.
Visit Clearlake Animal Control on Facebook or on the city’s website.
Email Elizabeth Larson at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Follow her on Twitter, @ERLarson, or Lake County News, @LakeCoNews.