With swine flu racing around the globe faster than a speeding bullet, the World Health Organization has just bumped its alert level to Phase 5 on a 6-point scale. That’s one notch below a flat-out pandemic.

Phase 5 means the virus is causing multiple, widespread outbreaks.

It is a call-to-arms to vaccine makers that it’s time to fire up the kilns, and serves notice that all countries should activate pandemic preparedness plans.

Earlier in the day, Senators queried Janet Napolitano, the Homeland Security Secretary as to whether the US should close its border with Mexico, the country of origin for the H1N1 virus and the place where nearly all of the deaths have occurred. That has not happened yet.

“There is a lot we don’t yet know about this outbreak. But at the same time we have been preparing as if we are facing a true pandemic, even though we don’t know the ultimate scope of what will occur,” Napolitano said.

The Big O urged Americans to take precautions. “This is obviously a serious situation — serious enough to take the utmost precaution,” he said.

Earlier today, the first US death from the disease was reported. It was a toddler who had just crossed the Mexican border into Texas.

The total number of affected US citizens was believed to be approaching 100, in at least these states: New York, California, Texas, Maine, Kansas and Massachusetts, Indiana, Ohio, Arizona and Nevada.

Also today, cases were reported for the first time in Germany and Austria, the 4th and 5th countries in Western Europe to have turned positive. They join Italy, Spain and the UK.

“If the situation deteriorates further, it is inevitable that international travel will be materially dented as it was evident during the case of SARS,” Lim Hwee Hua, Singapore’s second minister for finance and transportation told the Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, agricultural groups are worried the outbreak will scare consumers from pork. They want the Feds to refer to the culprit by its scientific name, H1N1.

When scientists showed that images of nearly nude females triggered alterations in cerebral blood flow and certain behaviors that were not entirely under the conscious control of males, some just shrugged.

What could be more obvious?

But the link between conscious and unconscious thought remains a hot topic among neurobiologists, even when sexual desire is not involved.

Joydeep Bhattacharya of Goldsmiths’ College in London and Bhavin Sheth of the University of Houston recently demonstrated that insight itself, the eureka moment when one reaches a breakthrough solution to a problem, is generated unconsciously before one becomes aware she’s solved it.  

The remarkable findings appear in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

The scientists affixed electroencephalographs to 18 adults and then challenged them with a brain-teaser that required just such a flash of insight to solve.

The problem was that there are 3 light switches on the ground-floor of a house, 2 of which do nothing while the third controls a light bulb on the second floor. The bulb is off at the start. Determine which switch is operational while making only one trip to the second floor.

Each EEG-wired subject was given 90 seconds to solve the puzzle, at which point a hint was provided. The hint was to turn one switch on for a good while before turning it off.

Some subjects solved it, some did not. What was interesting though was data from the EEG could be used to differentiate the insightful few from the rest of us.

Only the former exhibited increased gamma wave activity in the right frontal cortex.

And the knock-your-socks off corollary was that the gamma wave activity was observed up to eight seconds before the subject had the “aha!” moment.  (more…)

A Bush administration initiative requiring that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration crack down on companies with a history of job-related deaths has failed, according to a report by the Labor Department.

And that has resulted in dozens of avoidable fatalities.

The highly publicized initiative was designed to include rigorous data collection efforts, site inspections and beefed up rules enforcement at offending facilities.

It was marred by the inability to detect repeat fatalities due to misspellings of company names and failure to identify instances in which subsidiaries of the same company were involved.

Proper program implementation might have “deterred or abated hazards at the worksites of 45 employers where 58 subsequent fatalities occurred,” wrote Assistant Inspector General Elliot Lewis in the report, obtained by the Washington Post.

The report said that the Bush administration was “suggesting to the public that you’ve got an enhanced enforcement program going for five years, and it’s not enhanced at all,” Celeste Monforton told the Post.

She’s a former OSHA policy analyst who is currently an assistant professor at the GW School of Public Health and Health Services. 

The Big O has yet to appoint a new OSHA director.  

OSHA’s acting director, Donald Shalhoub admitted that his agency is to this day “not targeting the ‘bad actors’ the program is intended for,” but believes that insinuations that additional employees died as a result are “misleading and unfair,” according to the Post.