One Sentence News / July 31, 2023
Three news stories summarized & contextualized by analytic journalist Colin Wright.
Ticks are causing a red meat allergy in a growing number of Americans
Summary: A meat allergy caused by a tick-borne illness is becoming more common in the United States according to the CDC, with about 110,000 Americans developing it since 2010.
Context: The disease that causes this allergy is called Alpha-gal syndrome, and it’s spread by the lone star tick, which is most commonly found in the Eastern and Southern US, though like many pests, its area of operation is expanding as the climate changes; this allergy is sparked by tick-saliva that makes the human body treat a sugar molecule found in mammals like cows and pigs and deer as a foreign substance, which in turn causes the body to attack that substance—the end result being an allergic response to consuming mammalian meat that can be life-threatening, causing hives, nausea, diarrhea, and even anaphylaxis; there’s no known cure to this condition, and it’s still new enough that a recent survey of doctors found that 42% of them had never heard of it.
—Quartz
Northern China prepares for Doksuri floods, Beijing residents told to stay indoors
Summary: A powerful storm called Doksuri, previously designated Typhoon Doksuri before being downgraded, has made landfall in China as one of the strongest storms to hit the country in years, and has necessitated the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people across the southern portion of the country.
Context: Residents of Beijing have been warned to stay inside to avoid risks associated with anticipated record-high levels of rainfall, and Northern China is bracing for associated flooding of local rivers; Doksuri triggered deadly landslides across the Philippines before arriving in China, causing at least 39 deaths with 20 people still missing, and another storm—currently designated Typhoon Khanun—is expected to reach China’s densely populated coastline in the coming days.
—Reuters
US hunts Chinese malware that could disrupt American military operations
Summary: The US military is in the process of tracking down malicious computer code in its communication systems it’s believed Chinese hackers have inserted there, intending to disrupt military and possibly civilian operations in the event of a conflict between the two nations.
Context: Word of this reported infiltration initially leaked to the public when Microsoft announced that it had detected foreign code in telecommunications systems in Guam, which is home to a sprawling US military base, and in other parts of the US with similar infrastructure; that mysterious code turned out to be the tip of an alarming iceberg, and new reports indicate that the government has been tracking down components of this large jumble of malware for some time, now, which has led to the discovery of still more malicious code, raising alarms within the US military apparatus about just how far these hackers’ efforts might have gone, and just how embedded they might be, at this point, in vital US military and civilian infrastructure, making both more vulnerable; these revelations are becoming public at a fraught period of US-China relations—a moment in which both sides seem to be trying to find a way to work with each other and heal diplomatic damage—and this could slow or stall those efforts.
—The New York Times
A new Axios-Ipsos poll suggests that Americans are broadly in agreement on which health issues are most pressing, but there’s fairly stark disagreement about which are at the very top, with Democrats seeing guns as the primary area of concern, while Republicans are more likely to say they’re worried about opioids and obesity.
—Axios
1,000
Number of characters that can be used, per-post, in TikTok’s new text-based update format.
Such posts are more like the text option in Instagram Stories and Snapchat than those found on Twitter or Threads, but they’re still a notable addition for a social platform previously focused on short-form videos, and which now seems to be expanding its offerings to compete with other networks, beyond the video realm.
—The Verge
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