[Mount Sinabung spews pyroclastic smoke seen from Tigapancur village on Sunday in Karo district, North Sumatra, Indonesia. Mount Sinabung erupted eight times overnight and the Indonesian government raised the alert level for the volcano to the highest point on a four-stage scale. Photo by Ulet Ifansasti via Getty]
Topping the box office this weekend, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire opened with $161.1 million, making it the biggest November debut ever. According to the trend watchers at the New York Times, the Hunger Games movie franchise is now a "full-fledged cultural phenomenon."
Entrepreneur and investor Jason Calacanis offered an exquisite example of the dangers created by loosening the rules around crowd-funding. During a PandoMonthly fireside chat last night, Calacanis not only argued that any consumer knows how to pick a winning startups, but that the populist thing to do is to let the masses bet on them.
According to PandoDaily, Calacanis told the crowd:
People are gambling in Vegas and blowing their money. So this idea that – again, having been on the other side of it — the poor and the middle class don't have a lot of opportunities to hit a homerun. So now we finally have an opportunity to possibly hitting a homerun and people are worried about them? They're trying to exclude them?
But they're not excluded from Vegas. They're not excluded from betting their football pool. They can buy drugs or alcohol or gamble. They should have the freedom to angel invest with their money.
The thing is, consumers knew Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn were hits. They knew it, because they used the products. And it's probably clear to the person who used ZenDesk or Box or Dropbox in year one that those were going to be hits too.
Considering the number of retail investors who got screwed during the Facebook IPO while insiders made out like bandits that seems like a far-fetched conclusion. Should everyone that played Words with Friends have invested in Zynga? I've wasted scads of money playing Candy Crush, does that mean King.com won't be the next Zynga?
If the game is rigged
So why would Calacanis, a self-professed poker addict who once blew more than $200,000 on single hand
Now, thanks to a few hundred of his (not necessarily) closest friends, Jason is managing a $10 million early stage fund, founded with Yammer founder David Sachs, and leading a AngelList investment syndicate that consists of 234 backers pledging to contribute up to $905,000 to each of his deals – the fourth largest such Syndicate on the platform.
"All of a sudden my syndicate grew to $900,000, Kevin Rose's grew to to $2.5 million, and Dave Morin's is at $1.5 million – it's just become this incredible thing," Calacanis says. He was quick to qualify those numbers, however, saying, "maybe half that money will show up or a third of that money will show up on an individual deal basis."
Step down, folks. Let the nice men play games with your money.
[Image via Shutterstock.com]
On Saturday, the NAACP called on
prosecutors to upgrade
the charges from misdemeanors to felonies in the San Jose State University racial
hazing
You should never judge a book by its cover, unless its cover looks like David Adam Pate, 24, of Lancaster, S.C. Pate was charged with the murder of Ricky James, 33, on Friday after police determined he led James into the woods in mid-October, murdered him, and then covered his body with brush. Children playing in the area found James' body last weekend.
It was easy for authorities to arrest Pate because he was already in jail; he was arrested two weeks ago on a disorderly conduct charge.
According to Lancaster County Sheriff Barry Faile, "We suspected Pate almost immediately but had to wait on lab results to prove it." Hard to believe that the kind of guy who shows off his allegiance to Satan and his surgically split forked tongue in a mug shot would be automatically suspected of murder in a small South Carolina city.
[Mug shot via WISTV]
Nearly 11 percent of children in the United States between the ages of 4 and 17 have been diagnosed with ADHD, according to CDC researchers. Two-thirds of those children are currently being medicated.
[Long lines have been forming inside the David Zwirner gallery in New York City as visitors wait for their chance to stand inside one of artist's Yoyoi Kusama's "Infinity Rooms." The 84-year-old artist and creator of the "I Who Have Arrived In Heaven" exhibit is currently on leave from the Japanese psychiatric hospital she calls home. Photo by Andrew Toth via Getty]
San Antonio Police Officer Jackie Neal, 40, was on-duty Friday night when he allegedly pulled over a 19-year-old woman and raped her. He was arrested Saturday morning on a charge of felony assault and released on $20,000 bond.
Neal, an 11-year veteran of the force, told the woman her car was reported stolen. She showed him a sales slip for the recently purchased car, but he made her get out of the vehicle so he could pat her down. The driver demanded a female officer for the pat down but her request was ignored.
Neal proceeded to grope the woman during the pat down, put her into handcuffs, and then forced her into the back of his car where, according to the woman, he raped her. He instructed her after to keep it a secret though she reported it later that day.
While SAPD squad cars are outfitted with cameras, Neal's camera did not have a functioning hard drive at the time of the assault. According to Police Chief William McManus, Neal would have "been aware that the system was not functioning."
Even more horrifying, this is the third accusation of sexual misconduct against Neal. McManus told the San Antonio Express-News that a different woman made a "similar complaint" against Neal several years ago, but the woman "later refused" to cooperate in an investigation.
And in September, Neal was suspended for three days for dating an 18-year-old member of the Police Explorer program, a program designed to encourage young people to pursue careers in police work. After his suspension, Neal was transferred to the night shift because it makes sense to give known sexual predators free reign in the dark.
But at least the SAPD is siding with the victim. "There is no such thing a consensual sex on duty," according to McManus. "I feel silly even saying that we won't tolerate it. Of course we won't tolerate it. There is no gray area. This is a criminal offense." He also praised the victim for "having the courage to come forward and having the confidence in the SAPD to handle the case effectively."
Pending an indictment, Neal will continue to receive pay from the SAPD.
[Screenshot via FOX 29]
A Florida school believes it has found the perfect solution to the problem of a black student being bullied over her natural hair: Kick her out.
Vanessa VanDyke, 12, says administrators at Faith Christian Academy, a private school in Orlando, have deemed her hair a "distraction" after she complained about being teased by other students.
"There have been bullies in the school," Vanessa's mother Sabrina told Local 6 News. "There have been people teasing her about her hair, and it seems to me that they're blaming her."
According to Sabrina, her daughter had been going to school with the same hair for months, but was only labeled a "distraction" after the issue of bullying was brought before school officials.
Those officials have now given Vanessa two options: Cut and style her hair, or face expulsion.
"I'm depressed about leaving my friends and people that I've known for a while, but I'd rather have that than the principals and administrators picking on me and saying that I should change my hair," Vanessa said.
[screengrab via Facebook]
We hear a lot about how valuable our personal information in the age of social networking. There are all these tools to help us calculate how much our Twitter account is "worth" and movements to get Facebook to pay for our data. But, it turns out, our personal information is just worth pennies to the largest data-collection companies.
The peek into the exciting world of data-brokerage comes from this just-released agreement between the New Jersey division of consumer affairs and the impossibly sinister-sounding analytics company Dataium over a couple of bad things they did. (pdf) Most interesting is that Dataium shadily bought personal data on 400,000 people from another, even more sinister-sounding analytics company called Acxiom, one of the largest so-called "data-brokers" in the country. The data included the name, phone number, email address, and various data about their behavior on car shopping site. Dataium was considering using the info to help their clients better market to users.
And, according to the agreement, the 400,000 dossiers cost a measly $2,500. Your personal information is worth just $0.16. It's hard to know whether to be outraged or insulted.
[via Christopher Soghoian]
Hey whoa Thanksgiving is here! This means you will have to provide some victuals for some people, or else they will finally have the excuse for disowning/defriending/excommunicating you that they have always secretly wanted. Below you'll find all the Thanksgiving-relevant Foodspin action you'll need in order to preserve your seat at the Auxiliary Thanksgiving Annex Table in the basement. Good luck, and good eating!
"We're going to walk through making three of 'em—green-bean casserole, candied yams, and cranberry sauce—and if it turns out that all three of these are already spoken for in your family, well, somebody's gotta bring napkins, and that person can be run off the road and over a cliff on their way to the gathering and coldly usurped in the hearts and minds of all their loved ones."
"Despite having emailed the tasting instructions ('There are 3 loaves of pumpkin beer bread and one control loaf made with Budweiser. Each pan is marked. It would be great if you and some of the other guys could each try some of the control and then as much of any or all of the other three as you'd like'), AND leaving a hand-written note reiterating those same instructions in the bag with the bread, they'd managed to eat the entire control loaf ... but hadn't touched the loaves made with the pumpkin beer."
"The very most fun part of making macaroni and cheese is when you skip merrily through the cheese section of your supermarket and grab just a bunch of different cheeses that catch your eye: Pecorino and cheddar and Velveeta? Yes! Colby jack and Garrotxa and Port Salut? Fuck yeah! Twelve jars of Old El Paso Queso Dip? My legal counsel has advised me not to appear to endorse this course of action."
"The first thing to do is clear up any misconceptions that the reason to make mashed cauliflower, and not mashed potatoes, is that mashed cauliflower is the more calorically or nutritionally upstanding choice. If that is what you are thinking, stop thinking that, because that is stupid. You're stupid."
"You are of course free to use the apple variety of your choice here, unless the apple variety of your choice is the Red Delicious, in which case you are free to stick your tongue out as far as it will go and slap the fucking daylights out of it for being a dipshit."
"So the bad news is, yeah, when Aunt Hortense asked you to bring the potatoes, she was basically calling you a nigh-useless human dumpster fire who can't be trusted to crank open a can of cranberry jelly without sawing both your arms off and staggering over a cliff."
"I want you to sit down for this, because a revelation like the one I'm about to share might cause you to collapse from shock and I would hate to bear the blame for your bruised tailbone: In order to make bread pudding, you'll need bread."
"Conduct your sad, desperate, probably drunk kitchen raid mindful of the idea that if you have A) fowl, B) rich, starchy mush, and C) vaguely credible gravy, you can have a Thanksgiving meal that you could almost, almost describe to a coworker without causing him or her to make a sad face and put a comforting hand on your shoulder."
"Folly! Folly and self-deception! Even the nosepickingest Thanksgiving dunce knows good and goddamned well that by the time he's worked his way through a heaped plate of potatoes and stuffing and biscuits and green-bean casserole, he's not going to be hungry enough to find Brussels sprouts appetizing anymore and will skip over them altogether on his way to a wedge of pumpkin pie somehow exceeding 360 degrees, and then on the way home later he is going to think, 'Aw, man, I never had any of Bernice's Brussels sprouts,' as he dozes off with his foot on the accelerator and pinwheels his car into a gorge."
"Sangiovese—specifically Chianti, a mostly Sangiovese blend—is embraced by Italians as a catch-all wine pairing, and they seem to be pretty on the ball, at least so long as you discount World Wars I and II, Silvio Berlusconi, Nero, the grotesquely hirsute, paunchy, Speedo-clad bald man who parks himself next to you at every beach on earth, and The Godfather: Part III."
"I used to clean bar bathrooms, and an overwhelming majority of the bottles left in the john at the end of the night were Bud Light. Bud Light dudes are afraid of leaving their beer unattended, as if they have reason to worry about the fate of unattended beers. I suppose there's something apt about these beers ending the night on top of a urinal. It's like a little story about the nitrogen cycle."
"I don't know most of you, but I'm going to make the stupid assumption that you are honorable men and women with discerning palates, in which case your normal drink is probably bourbon. And since rent's due four days after Thanksgiving and you haven't even bought your turkey Lunchable yet, you're probably dealing with a tight budget. No problem. I've ranked cheap bourbon."
"Some people like to pile a portion of each of the various delicious Thanksgiving victuals between two pieces of bread, in what invariably turns into a saggy, dissolving, unmanageable wreck, renouncing any rightful claim to the 'sandwich' title within moments of its birth. Other folks prefer to stick to the holiday's saner-seeming sandwich fillings like sliced turkey and cranberry relish and salad, think there's something weird and redundant and brazenly gluttonous about putting stuffing (which is essentially pre-chewed bread) between two slices of bread, and are vampires."
The Foodspin archive: Chicken thighs
Fans at the Sydney premiere of Anchorman 2 were in for a surprise musical snack from the stars of the movie; Chris O'Dowd will die at the hands of James Franco; if you have Time Warner, you can finally watch Homeland anywhere you want, but why would you want to?; and Kanye West's plan for being a major designer is by first backing Adidas.
Breakdowns is a daily roundup of all the news that wasn't interesting enough to deserve two paragraphs.
We all love liberal Pope Francis! But beneath that love-everyone-even-the-godless-and-gay exterior, is he el papa del comunismo? Judging from his just-released 84-page exposition on the evils of consumerism and modern economics, he may start wearing a lot more red:
Just as the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say "thou shalt not" to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills.
Much of the papal document, an "apostolic exhortation" titled The Joy of the Gospel, deals with minutiae of how the many dioceses and parishes under Francis manage their workload of soul-savin'. But he makes clear that the Catholic Church's job would be made easier with some economic activism that would do occupiers proud, with headings like "No to the new idolatry of money," "No to a financial system which rules rather than serves," and "No to the inequality which spawns violence."
In any case, here are 10 more of the pontiff's most radical, Van Jones-loving lefty Marxist utterances about the "tyranny" of runaway corporate capitalism. There's something in here for everyone, even atheists. Except maybe the ones with "Who Is John Galt?" tee shirts. But seriously, who likes those guys? Fuck them.
"How can it be that it is not a news item when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points? This is a case of exclusion."
"Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities, without any means of escape."
"Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a 'disposable' culture which is now spreading. It is no longer simply about exploitation and oppression, but something new."
"[S]ome people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naïve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system."
"Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people's pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else's responsibility and not our own."
"The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase; and in the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us."
"While the earnings of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation. Consequently, they reject the right of states, charged with vigilance for the common good, to exercise any form of control."
"In this system, which tends to devour everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule."
"Money must serve, not rule! The Pope loves everyone, rich and poor alike, but he is obliged in the name of Christ to remind all that the rich must help, respect and promote the poor. I exhort you to generous solidarity and a return of economics and finance to an ethical approach which favours human beings."
"Today in many places we hear a call for greater security. But until exclusion and inequality in society and between peoples is reversed, it will be impossible to eliminate violence."
Question, though: Is all this problematic, given the Church's massive (publicly undisclosed) wealth and the fact that it's embedded in the very international system of usury that Francis—and Jesus—condemned? Well, yeah, entirely.
[Photo credit: AP]
"Few comics could get away with such an irreverent act, but [Sarah] Silverman pulls it off with her disconnected style that blends vulgarity and vulnerability," is how Chicago Sun-Times critic Lori Rackl described the recent HBO comedy special Sarah Silverman: We Are Miracles. The two-minute-or-so joke above, finds Silverman at her risky best. She's been telling variations of this exaggerated joke on the road for over a year to acclaim. Her depiction of the guilty rape survivor will hit too close to home for some (which could describe virtually all of her jokes), but in a year featuring multiple public arguments about rape jokes, this seems almost impossibly funny. It's about as good (if much lighter) of a bookend as Patricia Lockwood's poem "The Rape Joke."
Award-winning independent newspaper supported by US government funding writes a story about how the sequester may deprive it of US government funding. Said newspaper could run three more decades for the estimated cost of one F-35 fighter jet.
[Salam, 5, an African lion, stands on the branches of a tree at the Ramt Gan safari near Tel Aviv. Photo by Ariel Schalit via AP]
60 Minutes reporter Lara Logan and producer Max McClellan were sent on a leave of absence after CBS finished investigating the pair's now-discredited report on the Benghazi attacks. "The 60 MINUTES journalistic review is concluded, and we are implementing ongoing changes based on its results," a spokesman told Gawker.
"From the start, Lara Logan and her producing team were looking for a different angle to the story of the Benghazi attack," CBS News Executive Director of Standards and Practices Al Ortiz wrote in an internal memo summarizing the investigation's findings, a copy of which was obtained by Huffington Post's Michael Calderone. Ortiz listed 10 key failures of reporting or disclosure in Logan's October report—which relied on now-debunked claims from a private security contractor to blamed the Obama administration for the deaths of four Americans in the September 11, 2012, attacks on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
Jeff Fage, the chairman of CBS News and executive producer of 60 Minutes, followed up Ortiz' report with an announcement of personnel changes:
There is a lot to learn from this mistake for the entire organization. We have rebuilt CBS News in a way that has dramatically improved our reporting abilities. Ironically 60 Minutes, which has been a model for those changes, fell short by broadcasting a now discredited account of an important story, and did not take full advantage of the reporting abilities of CBS News that might have prevented it from happening.
As a result, I have asked Lara Logan, who has distinguished herself and has put herself in harm's way many times in the course of covering stories for us, to take a leave of absence, which she has agreed to do. I have asked the same of producer Max McClellan, who also has a distinguished career at CBS News.
Fage also criticized himself for letting Logan's story go forward: "I pride myself in catching almost everything, but this deception got through and it shouldn't have."
[Photo credit: AP]
The lead singer of the popular rock band Lostprophets pleaded guilty today to multiple sexual offenses involving children, the most serious by far being the attempted rape of an infant.
"He accepts he was a determined and committed pedophile," the prosecution said of Ian Watkins.
According to the BBC, the 36-year-old Welsh musician pleaded guilty to "three counts of sexual assault involving children and six involving taking, making or possessing indecent images of children and one of possessing an extreme pornographic image involving a sex act on an animal."
Court documents show Watkins had recorded his crimes and kept the evidence on his computer.
Police say some of the material recovered was "too extreme" to detail.
In addition to Watkins, the prosecution also brought charges against two female co-defendants who "abused their own children and made them available to Watkins for him to abuse."
One of the two women was the mother of an 11-month-old boy whom Watkins admitted he attempted to rape.
"This investigation has uncovered the most shocking and harrowing child abuse evidence I have ever seen," South Wales Police rep Peter Doyle said. "There is no doubt in my mind that Ian Watkins exploited his celebrity status in order to abuse young children."
The prosecution said drugs played "a significant part in his offending against children."
Watkins initially denied the charges against him, claiming he was the victim of a "malicious campaign."
The Lostprophets went on an indefinite hiatus following Watkins arrest last year, and officially disbanded last month.
Lostprophets guitarist Lee Gaze reacted to today's news with a Twitter post that said, simply: "That was over quick. Thank fuck."
[mug shot via BBC News]
If you're about to fly somewhere for Thanksgiving, you're probably dreading the possibility that you'll catch a bug along the way. And with good reason: Many people come down with something nasty in the days following an airplane flight. Why does this happen, and how can you keep yourself from getting sick?
A couple I met on a plane flight prompted me to find out. I met Tom and Nancy some years back on a trip from Boston to Phoenix. The two of them were on their way to San Francisco to visit with Tom's sister for the week. A few seconds after we'd introduced ourselves, the smell of antiseptic drew my attention away from the baggage handlers on the tarmac loading luggage into the belly of the plane; each of my row-mates was armed with a disinfectant wipe. Tom was busy wiping down his tray table, and Nancy had already moved on to dabbing purposefully at her seat's headrest. I asked if she brought cleaning supplies on all her plane flights.
"Our doctor recommended it to us a few years ago," she said as she reached for her clutch bag, withdrew a powder-blue face mask and began looping its elastic straps over her ears. "We've been bringing wipes on all our plane flights ever since."
And the mask, I ask her. What is that for? "It's to help filter the air," she explained from behind the mask, its pleats expanding slightly as she mouthed-out her word. "The air you're breathing is being recirculated through the cabin — we're all breathing one another's air.
"It's disgusting," she concluded as she reached back into her bag and pulled out two more masks. She handed one to Tom and presented the other to me. "Would you like one?"
Do we have to turn into Nancy and Tom to stay healthy on a plane flight? Yes and no.
As it turns out, Nancy and Tom are right to be paranoid about the microscopic bugs that might be crawling around on their tray tables (more on this later), but you might be surprised to learn that their concern over the cleanliness of the cabin's circulating air supply is largely unfounded.
The idea of a germ-ridden, recycled, in-flight air supply is one of the most widely propagated urban myths about airline sanitation out there. As a result, many people (Nancy, Tom and — until recently — myself included) assume that if so much as one person on their flight is sick with something, everyone on board will have the misfortune of breathing in that person's germs — all thanks to the cabin's "recirculated" air supply.
In reality, however, the air you breath on a typical airplane flight is thoroughly clean. Fresh air from outside the plane is continuously drawn into the cabin via what are known as compressor stages in the jet's engines. These stages compress the very cold and extremely thin air from outside the plane until its pressure matches that of the cabin. Pressurizing the air also heats it up, so it's cooled back down before passing through High-Efficiency Particulate Air (HEPA) filters (which remove a minimum of 99.97% of any airborne particulates, bacteria and viruses) and combining with recirculated cabin air.
But there's that word again. Recirculated.
Yes, the fresh air from outside the plane combines with some air that's already been making the rounds in the cabin for a little while — but that circulating air started out as fresh external air itself, and it too has been cycling through HEPA filters. What's more, recirculating cabin air is continuously released from the plane via outflow valves, so air inside the plane is constantly being replaced by the fresh air from outside. In fact, the average airplane's cabin air is completely refreshed about 20 times per hour. By comparison, the air in your average office building (which is also typically HEPA-filtered) is refreshed just 12 times per hour. In other words, the air you breathe at cruising altitude is most likely significantly cleaner than just about any you're liable to find on the ground.
But let's get back to the wipes that Tom, Nancy and I used to disinfect our tray tables, arm rests and seat backs. Could these surfaces really pose that serious a risk of infection? Did disinfectant really need to be brought into the equation?
To find out, I spoke with microbiologist Charles Gerba. Gerba heads up a research lab in the University of Arizona's College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and is an expert on what are known in the medical community as "fomites" — inanimate objects or materials that are liable to carry and transmit infection. The term is commonly used to describe potentially dangerous surfaces in hospital settings, but much of the research in the Gerba lab tends to look at how diseases spread via surfaces found in a variety of other indoor environments, like public restrooms and airplanes.
Gerba confirms to me that the plane's air supply should be the last of my concerns when I take to the skies. He even tells me that on most airplanes, the air is circulated throughout the cabin not from front to back, but from top to bottom. This keeps air supplies localized throughout the plane, so even if you are "sharing somebody else's air" (which, remember, is being constantly filtered and refreshed, anyway) you're only sharing it with the people in your immediate vicinity — not the entire cabin.
But we don't linger on the subject of ventilation for long. Our discussion quickly shifts to the real reason you're always getting sick on airplanes: having so many people in such a confined space means that just about every surface on your typical plane is packing some serious fomite potential.
"Where are you most likely to catch something on a plane?" Gerba repeats my question back to me. "Probably wherever you're sitting."
Gerba can rattle off horror stories that will make you never want to fly on an airplane again. It's a good idea to avoid aisle seats, for example, because according to Gerba, those are the ones most likely to come in contact with — and therefore be contaminated by — other members of your flight. He offers up an extreme example to illustrate why this is. In 2008, members of a tour group afflicted with norovirus (a wicked stomach virus transmitted in fecal matter via food, people, and infected surfaces) came down with symptoms of uncontrollable vomiting and diarrhea during a flight from Boston to Los Angeles.
According to Gerba, it was the very definition of a shit show. Infected passengers were experiencing diarrhea and vomiting throughout the plane (including one accident smack dab in the middle of first class) as they rushed to use the plane's lavatories and dispose of barf bags. Conditions got so awful the flight had to reroute for an emergency landing in Chicago, where infected passengers were rushed off to hospitals for treatment.
When the CDC contacted the plane's other passengers to follow up on whether or not they later came down with norovirus, they found that the ones most likely to have contracted the illness had been sitting in an isle seat. Obviously because people in the aisle seats were closer to the infected passengers who were moving throughout the plane, said Gerba, but also because people tend to use seats to stable themselves as they walk about the cabin. Infections were likely passed along via contact made with surfaces touched by the plane's sick passengers. (The figure shown here illustrates the seating on the flight with transmission of norovirus among passengers.)
The norovirus scenario obviously represents an extreme case, but Gerba says it helps underscore one of the reasons that airplanes (even more than subways, trains, and buses) — are especially prone to harboring illness. "Most people have probably never counted," says Gerba, "but your average plane flight will have just one toilet per fifty people; and [on some flights], that number is closer to 75."
"And remember," Gerba reminds me, "these planes see hundreds of passengers a day." When you combine a lot of people with not a lot of restrooms, he explains, you start seeing much higher rates of bacteria and viruses. That includes everything from norovirus, to seasonal flu, to the common cold, to Escheria coli.
These bugs obviously appear in especially high numbers in the plane's restrooms. "You find a lot of E. coli on lavatory surfaces — even more than your typical public bathroom" says Gerba. "Especially around those tiny sinks, because passengers with big hands can't fit their hands in." Which is a real shame, I chime in, because washing your hands is obviously important. But here's the rub: Gerba tells me that even if you can fit your hands in the sink, it's probably best to bring some hand sanitizer along to be extra sure you're killing off as many microorganisms as possible. Why? Because even the sink water could be contaminated. "The EPA recently got on airlines for having choliform bacteria (fecal bacteria) in the airplane's water supply" Gerba says. "They've done a number of studies, and have come down pretty hard."
Fortunately, the EPA's efforts have translated to improved water quality. Things are still far from perfect (from 2005 to 2008, 3.6 percent of random airplane water samples still tested positive for fecal bacteria), but at least the EPA's Aircraft Drinking Water Rule, promulgated in October of 2009, helps keep contaminated water out of, for example, the drinks of passengers.
According to Jonathan Sexton, a researcher in Gerba's lab, infectious bugs aren't restricted to an airplane's restrooms.
Your tray table, your complimentary pillow (which is often recycled flight after flight), the arms of your seat, your seat back pocket, the contents of your seat back pocket — these are all potential fomites, and evidence suggests that, like the lavatories, they're more contaminated than the surfaces in your typical public environment.
Consider, for example, a study conducted by Sexton back in 2007. He collected samples from a variety of surfaces across numerous everyday environments (including airplanes) and analyzed them for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (aka MRSA — a deadly superbug that before the 1990s was found primarily in hospitals).
"We went ahead and tested multiple tray tables across three different planes. Sixty percent of [the tray tables, across all of the planes] tested positive for MRSA.
"We [also] found it in personal vehicles, offices, workplaces — everywhere. In just about every instance it appeared more often in the airplanes, but that could also be due to our smaller sample size [of three airplanes]."
By comparison, Sexton found MRSA in 3% of personal vehicles, 3.24% of work offices, 6.25% of public restrooms, and about a third of the home offices tested — opposed to one hundred percent of the inspected planes.
"I always make sure that if I use my tray table — which I don't do very often — I've wiped it off with a clorox wipe and carry hand sanitizer," says Sexton. He continues:
You also always want to make sure if you have any open wounds that you have them covered up. Always make sure you wash your hands before you eat, or if you're coming into contact with any "high-touch" areas. It's good to be mindful of that.
The next time you're packing your carry-on for a flight, side with the disinfectant wipes and hand sanitizer over the filter mask; at the end of the day, it's coming into contact with a plane's countless potentially infected surfaces that's going to do you in — not the cabin's air supply (though the face mask could certainly help remind you to keep your fingers away from your mouth and nose, so go ahead and bring that along with you if you feel like making those around you feel especially unclean).
When you combine the risk of infection-exposure with the stress of travel, dehydration (airplanes are notoriously dry), and the body-wrecking effects of jet lag, it's no wonder people often fall ill after a plane flight. So remember to be vigilant about the surfaces you come into contact with; bring some clorox wipes and some hand sanitizer on your next trip; and make sure your water comes from a bottle — or at least somewhere other than the plane.
And remember: no licking the lavatory sinks.
Top image via ssguy/Shutterstock; Plane aisle via Kevin Morris; low level aisle photo by sujal; Seating diagram by the CDC via Clinical Infectious Disease; Jet engine by Francois Roche; Tray table via Jonathan G/Shutterstock; lavatory via
This io9 Flashback originally appeared in November 2011
Inexplicably prominent conservative "thinker" has Thanksgiving thoughts about that black guy and that other black guy. Seems solid.
