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Oil prices are likely to fluctuate because of
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Cooperative competition. Competitive cooperation. Confused Airline alliances have travellers scratching their heads over what’s going on in the skies. Some folks view alliances as a blessing to travellers, offering seamless travel, reduced fares and enhanced frequent-flyer benefits. Others see a conspiracy of big businesses, causing de- creased competition, increased fares and fewer choices. Whatever your opinion, there’s no escaping airline alliances: the marketing hype is unrelenting, with each of the two mega-groupings, One world and Star Alliance, promoting itself as the best choice for all travellers. And, even if you turn away from their ads, chances are they will figure in any of your travel plans. By the end of the year, One world and Star Alliance will between them control more than 40% of the traffic in the sky. Some pundits predict that figure will be more like 75% in 10 years. But why, after years of often ferocious competition, have airlines decided to band together Let’s just say the timing is mutually convenient. North American airlines, having exhausted all means of earning customer loyalty at home, have been looking for ways to reach out to foreign flyers. Asian carriers are still hurting from the region-wide economic downturn that began two years ago -- just when some of the airlines were taking delivery of new aircraft. Alliances also allow carriers to cut costs and increase profits by pooling manpower resources on the ground (rather than each airline maintaining its own ground crew) and code-sharing--the practice of two partners selling tickets and operating only one aircraft. So alliances are terrific for airlines--but are they good for the passenger Absolutely, say the airlines: think of the lounges, the joint FFP (frequent flyer programme) benefits, the round-the-world fares, and the global service networks. Then there’s the promise of "seamless" travel: the ability to, say, travel from Singapore to Rome to New York to Rio de Janiero, all on one ticket, without having to wait hours for connections or worry about your bags. Sounds utopian Peter Buecking, Cathay Pacific’s director of sales and marketing, thinks that seamless travel is still evolving. "It’s fair to say that these links are only in their infancy. The key to seamlessness rests in infrastructure and information sharing. We’re working on this." Henry Ma, spokesperson for Star Alliance in Hong Kong, lists some of the other benefits for consumers : "Global travellers have an easier time making connections and planning their itineraries. " Ma claims alliances also assure passengers consistent service standards. Critics of alliances say the much-touted benefits to the consumer are mostly pie in the sky, that alliances are all about reducing costs for the airlines, rationalizing services and running joint marketing programmes. Jeff Blyskal, associate editor of Consumer Reports magazine, says the promotional ballyhoo over alliances is much ado about nothing. "I don’t see much of a gain for consumers: alliances are just a marketing gimmick. And as far as seamless travel goes, I’ll believe it when I see it. Most airlines can’t even get their own connections under control, let alone coordinate with another airline. " Blyskal believes alliances will ultimately result in decreased flight choices and increased costs for consumers. Instead of two airlines competing and each operating a flight on the same route at 70% capacity, the allied pair will share the route and run one full flight. Since fewer seats will be available, passengers will be obliged to pay more for tickets. The truth about alliances and their merits probably lies somewhere between the travel utopia presented by the players and the evil empires portrayed by their critics. And how much they affect you depends on what kind of traveller you are. Those who’ve already made the elite grade in the FFP of a major airline stand to benefit the most when it joins an alliance: then they enjoy the FFP perks and advantages on any and all of the member carriers. For example, if you’re a Marco Polo Club "gold" member of Cathay Pacific’s Asia Miles FFP, you will automatically be treated as a valuable customer by all members of One world, of which Cathay Pacific is a member even if you’ve never flown with them before. For those who haven’t made the top grade in any FFP, alliances might be a way of simplifying the earning of frequent flyer miles. For example, I belong to United Airline’s Mile- age Plus and generally fly less than 25,000 miles a year. But 1 earn miles with every flight l take on Star Alliance member--All Nippon Airways and Thai Airways. If you fly less than I do, you might be smarter to stay out of the FFP game altogether. Hunt for bargains when booking flights and you might be able to save enough to take that extra trip anyway. The only real benefit infrequent flyers can draw from an alliance is an inexpensive round-the-world fare. The bottom line: for all the marketing hype, alliances aren’t all things to all people--but everybody can get some benefit out of them. One disadvantage of alliances foreseen by the critics is that air travel may be more expensive as a result of
A team of international researchers has found new evidence that an endangered subspecies of chimpanzee is the source of the virus that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) in humans. Experts said the finding could lead to new treatments for AIDS and contribute to the development of a vaccine against the disease. The research team said the chimp -- a subspecies known as Pan troglodytes native to west central Africa carries a simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) that is closely related to three strains of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the virus that causes AIDS. One of these strains, HIV-1, has caused the vast majority of the estimated 30 million HIV infections around the world. The researchers are uncertain when the chimp virus, called SIVcpz (for simian immunodeficiency virus chimpanzee), first infected humans, although the oldest documented case of HIV has been linked to a Bantu man who died in Central Africa in 1959. But they said the virus, which does not appear to harm the chimps, was most likely transmitted to humans when hunters were exposed to chimp blood while killing and butchering the animals for food. Once transmitted to humans, the researchers believe the virus mutated into HIV-1. Team leader Beatrice Hahn, an AIDS researcher at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, said the chimps have probably carried the virus for hundreds of thousands of years. Since humans have probably hunted the animals since prehistoric times, Hahn said the virus may have jumped to humans on many occasions, but was not transmitted widely among humans until the 20th century. Increased hunting of the chimpanzees, along with human migration to African cities and changing sexual mores, could help explain the recent epidemic, Hahn said. Scientists had long suspected that a nonhuman primate was the source of HIV-1. Earlier studies suggested that the sooty mangabey monkey, a native of West Africa, was the likely source of HIV-2 - a rarer form of the AIDS virus that is transmitted less easily than HIV-1. However, only a few samples of SIV strains exist, making it difficult for researchers to confidently connect the strains to HIV-1. As part of their effort to discover the source of HIV-1, the research team studied the four known samples of SIVcpz. They learned that three of the four samples came from chimps belonging to the subspecies P. t. troglodytes. The remaining sample came from another subspecies, Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii, which inhabits East Africa. The team then compared the SIVcpz strains to each other and found that all three of the viruses from P.t. troglodytes were closely related, while the virus from P. t. schweinfurthii was genetically different. Next they compared the SIVcpz strains to the main subgroups of HIV-1, known as M, N, and O. Their comparisons showed that the P.t. troglodytes viruses strongly resembled all three HIV-1 subgroups. Additional evidence that HIV-1 could be linked to P. t. troglodytes came when the researchers examined the chimps’ natural habitat. The researchers quickly discovered that the chimps live primarily in the West African nations of Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, and the Republic of the Congo, the geographic region where HIV-1 was first identified. Upon closer study, the researchers learned that the chimps were being killed in growing numbers for the so-called bushmeat trade, a trend assisted by the construction of new logging roads in once remote forests. The researchers said that continued hunting of the animals meant that many people are still likely to be exposed to SIVcpz, increasing the risk of additional cross-species transmissions. Many AIDS researchers welcomed the team’s finding, but said the new work had not proved the connection definitively. Most of the doubts centered on the difficulty of drawing conclusions from such a small number of SIVcpz samples. Because so few samples exist -- all drawn from chimps in captivity--researchers do not know how prevalent the virus is among wild chimps, or how the virus is transmitted. Doubts are likely to persist until the course of the virus is studied in chimps in the wild. Some health experts said the finding could have far-reaching implications for combating AIDS. Because SIVcpz does not cause the chimps to become ill, researchers believe that the animals’ disease-fighting immune systems may have developed a defense against the virus. Since chimps are 98 percent genetically similar to humans, learning more about the chimps’ immune systems could shed light on new ways to prevent and treat AIDS in humans. Discovering how the chimp’s immune system controls the virus, for example, could help researchers develop a vaccine that generates a similar immune- system response in humans. Other experts noted that even if the finding does not help in the fight against AIDS, it provides strong evidence that dangerous viruses can be transmitted to humans from wild animals. In some cases, the viruses may be harmless to the host animals, but cause sickness and death when transmitted to humans. As people increasingly venture into remote animal habitats, some scientists believe there is a growing risk of new human exposures to previously unknown disease-causing microbes. In the meantime, widespread slaughter of the chimps could make further study of P.t. troglodytes difficult. The wild chimp population, which exceeded 1 million animals in the early 20th century, is now believed to number fewer than 100,000. "We cannot afford to lose these animals, either from the animal’s conservation point of view or a medical investigation standpoint," said Hahn. "It is quite possible that the chimpanzee, which has served as the source of HIV-1, also holds the clues to its successful control.\ Since chimpanzees are genetically very similar to humans,
For much of the world, the death of Richard Nixon was the end of a complex public life. But researchers who study bereavement wondered if it didn’t also signify the end of a private grief. Had the former president merely run his allotted fourscore and one, or had he fallen victim to a pattern that seems to afflict longtime married couples: one spouse quickly following the other to the grave Pat, Nixon’s wife of 53 years, died last June after a long illness. No one knows for sure whether her death contributed to his. After all, he was elderly and had a history of serious heart disease. Researchers have long observed that the death of a spouse, particularly a wife, is sometimes followed by the untimely death of the grieving survivor. Historian Will Durant died 13 days after his wife and collaborator, Ariel; Buckminster Fuller and his wife died just 36 hours apart. Is this more than coincidence "Part of the story, I suspect, is that we men are so used to ladies feeding us and taking care of us," says Knud Helsing, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, "that when we lose a wife we go to pieces. We don’t know how to take care of ourselves. " In one of several studies Helsing has conducted on bereavement, he found that widowed men had higher mortality rates than married men in every age group. But, he found that widowers who remarried enjoyed the same lower mortality rate as men who’d never been widowed. Women’s health and resilience may also suffer after the loss of a spouse. In a 1987 study of widows, researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles, and UC, San Diego, found that they had a dramatic decline in levels of important immune- system cells that fight off disease. Earlier studies showed reduced immunity in widowers. For both men and women, the stress of losing a spouse can have a profound effect. "All sorts of potentially harmful medical problems can be worsened," says Gerald Davison, professor of psychology at the University of Southern California. People with high blood pressure, for example, may see it rise. In Nixon’s case, Davison speculates, "the stroke, although not caused directly by the stress, was probably hastened by it." Depression can affect the surviving spouse’s will to live; suicide is elevated in the bereaved, along with accidents not involving cars. Involvement in life helps prolong it. Mortality, says Duke University psychiatrist Daniel Blazer, is higher in older people without a good social-support-system, who don’t feel they’re part of a group or a family, that they "fit in" somewhere. And that’s a more common problem for men, who tend not to have as many close friendships as women. The sudden absence of routines can also be a health hazard, says Blazer. "A person who loses a spouse shows deterioration in normal habits like sleeping and eat- rag," he says. "They don’t have that other person to orient them, like when do you go to bed, when do you wake up, when do you eat, when do you take your medication, when do you go out to take a walk Your pattern is no longer locked into someone else’s pattern, so it deteriorates." While earlier studies suggested that the first six months to a year--or even the first week--were times of higher mortality for the bereaved, some newer studies find no special vulnerability in this initial period. Most men and women, of course, do not die as a result of the loss of a spouse. And there are ways to improve the odds. A strong sense of separate identity and lack of over-dependency during the marriage are helpful. Adult sons and daughters, siblings and friends need to pay special attention to a newly widowed parent. They can make sure that he or she is socializing, getting proper nutrition and medical care, expressing emotion and, above all, feeling needed and appreciated. The passage states that while married couples can prepare for grieving by
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