Single celled organisms such as algae and dinoflagellates thrive in oceans. They reproduce quickly into “blooms” if their environment has high nutrient. When some of these algae grow rapidly, become dense, and appear as patches near the water’s surface, a “red tide” occurs, owing to their reddish appearance.

“Red tide” is a colloquial term for harmful algal bloom (HAB) which is a dense aggregation of phytoplankton, algae, or cyanobacteria in marine or aquatic environment. Some species of cyanobacteria produce neurotoxins, hepatotoxins, cytotoxins, and endotoxins, making them dangerous to animals and humans.

Scientists clarify, however, that not all algal blooms are harmful, not all cause discoloration of water, and that these blooms are not associated with tides. What HABs are associated with, though, are large-scale marine mortality events and various types of shellfish poisonings.

When organisms produce neurotoxins that are harmful to shellfish and fish, these contaminated seafood become toxic food for humans. People who have eaten toxic fish and shellfish get contaminated with Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning (PSP).

Paralytic shellfish poisoning is caused by dinoflagellates that have a red-brown color, and can grow to such numbers that they cause red streaks to appear in the ocean called “red tides.” Shellfish that have caused this disease include mussels, cockles, clams, scallops, oysters, crabs, and lobsters.

Symptoms begin anywhere from 15 minutes to 10 hours after eating the contaminated shellfish, although usually within 2 hours. Symptoms are generally mild, and begin with numbness or tingling of the face, arms, and legs. This is followed by headache, dizziness, nausea, and muscular incoordination. Patients sometimes describe a floating sensation. In cases of severe poisoning, muscle paralysis and respiratory failure follow, and in these cases death may occur in 2 to 25 hours.

With a lack of comprehensive and conclusive studies, red tides are believed to be natural phenomena, not caused by humans. Red tides and harmful algae blooms sometimes occur where there is no apparent link to human activity. Some red tides and harmful algae blooms along the Pacific coast have been associated with cyclical El Nino weather patterns. Scientists have correlated the increase of Pacific red tides and other harmful algae blooms with a rise in ocean temperature of approximately one degree Celsius.

Other scientists, however, have correlated red tides with increased nutrients in coastal waters from sewage and fertilizers. These scientists generally believe that coastal pollution from human sewage, agricultural runoff, and other sources contribute to red tides, along with rising ocean temperatures.

With widespread human activity affecting the environment for the last hundreds of years, it is difficult to believe that red tides which eventually cause deaths among humans are not caused by people themselves.

Tags: Red Tide, Paralytic Shellfish Poisoning (PSP), Algae Blooms

Domestic Violence (DV) and Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) are not confined to any age, sex, race, culture, religion, education, employment, or marital status. Anybody can be a victim. Domestic Violence is not a gender issue. Both men and women can be abused.

Domestic violence is a human issue – just like all violence. In domestic relations, women are as inclined as men to engage in physically abusive acts. Yet societal consciousness has ascribed the issue with a masculine behavior of assault, thereby rendering a false and inaccurate view of the problem. This popular view has led to social policies that are frail in addressing the problem of domestic violence successfully. One look at efforts of giant policy think tanks such as the United Nations and you can see that social and developmental policies regarding domestic violence take the popular view. Yet, the social malaise is just observably getting worse.

California State University Professor Martin Fiebert summarizes almost 200 studies online about assaults by women on their intimate partners. Last updated in May 2008, the bibliography examines 219 scholarly investigations, of which 170 are empirical studies and 49 are reviews and/or analyses. The aggregate sample size in the reviewed studies exceeds 221,300. The findings disclose that women are as physically aggressive, or more aggressive, than men in their relationships with their spouses or male partners. This sociological data shows that women initiate domestic violence as often as men do, that women use weapons more than men, and that 38% of injured victims are men.

On a wider scale, so as to merit logical generalizations, little is currently known about the actual number of men who are in an abusive domestic relationship. The biggest reason behind this is that fewer incidents are reported. Male victims are often ashamed that others will perceive them as weak or less of a man. They think that the police will not take their allegation seriously since “only men are the abusers.” They feel that people will not believe them.

Men’s gender-bias psyché further hampers them from admitting that they are, indeed, victims of DV. Even if the abusive incident happens publicly, men can justify their inaction by saying that they will never retaliate. Thus, they interpret the abuse as a sign of strength or masculinity, credited to them. When psychological and emotional abuse becomes cyclical, as domestic violence is wont to be, men begin to believe that they deserve the abuse. Loss of self-esteem is one of the harshest effects of domestic violence – for both men and women.

Reasons, triggers, methods, and consequences vary for intimate partner abuse against men by women and against women by men. The common denominator, however, lies in motive. As in abuse of women, abuse of men is also about control. Domestic violence is about control of power – physical, emotional, psychological, and economic. Control that has gone crazy.

To gain that control, an abuser will manifest behavior that assuages his or her emotional torment that he or she is out of control. Some of these forms of behavior are screaming, verbal abuse, silence, withholding attention, affection, and sex, inflicting of physical pain, drinking, doing drugs, and other addictive behaviors. These bury the pain felt inside – for the moment.

Another common ground for abuse inflicted by both men and women is the phenomenon of the abuse cycle. Tension builds up – verbal attacks increase – violence explodes – the abused accuses the abuser – the abuser repents and asks for forgiveness – the abuser promises that the incident will never happen again – the abuser woos back the abused – the abused forgives the abuser – the two are back in each other’s arms – peace and quiet for a while – then tension builds up again – verbal attacks increase once more, and so on and so forth – in a cyclical mode. The cycle of abuse can be summarized into 5 phases: Tension – Explosion – Discussion – Honeymoon – Peace – then back to Tension.

The dynamics of domestic violence is the common denominator between abuses done on men by women and on women by men. The biggest difference, however, seems to lie in the preponderance of abuse. Maybe because there is more data on female victims and less on male victims that is why it is said that most victims of DV are women.

The United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) states that at least one out of every three women around the world is a victim of violence against women. She has been beaten, forced to have sex, emotionally and psychologically abused, and economically deprived in her lifetime. In all these forms of oppression, her abuser is most likely someone she knows – and oftentimes, she had trusted. Right now, what is known is that violence against women (VAW) is a problem of pandemic proportions.

What do you know? What do you believe?

Males are generally free. The apparent characteristics and attributes of being a man were more freely given to them to experience, early on. When they were younger, there was more appreciation and less censure in emulating these traits. In fact, there is general pride with a boy who is starting to be like a grown-up ‘man.’ Maleness is a source of dignity and honor.

I wanted to make this balanced, and feature ‘women in training’ as well. But in the process of thinking up images, and consequently looking for pictures to depict the thought, I get to conclude that the concept of ‘women in training’ is largely based on such notions as “don’t,” “can’t,” “shouldn’t,” and the like, thus putting them in the realm of ‘inappropriate,’ ‘obscure,’ even ‘taboo.’ Women simply take less, even if they, in no way, are less, do less, or give less.

When society decided to be more colorful and descriptive, the only two sexes of male and female became the concepts of masculine (strong and brave, aggressive, provider, etc.) and feminine (weak, demure, nurturer, etc.). Society went a few more steps ahead and gave birth to the prescriptive notions of “be a man” and “act like a woman.” There, too, are the psychologically reverse admonitions (and self-esteem crushers) of “not manly enough” and “so unladylike.”

Our parents gave the world only male and female, but society gave us the masculine man and the feminine woman (and all other cross-combinations thereof). And since our parents are children of society themselves, they didn’t know better than to make us live in a world where gender rules. So, baby blankets have been blue for boys and pink for girls.

Our parents were the ones who demarcated our future freedoms and made us “weak” (frail, fragile, feeble, etc.) or “strong” (forceful, hardy, unbending, etc.). They handed down to us their definitions of the stereotypes and the pertinent parameters of these stock categories), as much as their own parents made them turn out the way they did. The potential for freedom and equality starts from the home.

So long as there are parents of children and children who would be parents, there won’t be any cultural revolution regarding this gender trend. It is so buried deep down in humanity’s collective psyché that an overhaul will probably come only way after all our lifetimes put together.

Since gender is a product of society and culture, social conditioning breeds gender inequality.

Her name is a vernacular derivative of the word rose. Rosing was beautiful, all right, and her life was not lacking in thorns. But the woman was a fighter long before women of her generation knew how to fight.

Our common knowledge about her starts only from around circa WWII. It’s as if her story came to be told from this time onward. She lost her only brother during that world war, and fiercely protected her mother and young daughter from the abuses of the Japanese imperial forces that had occupied the Philippines at that time. They would hide in caves in the mountainous regions of northern Philippines whenever the Japanese would conduct carpet bombing over the areas. On quieter days, she would haul an entire carabao that had lost its way, bring the animal to her family’s hiding place, butcher it, cut it up, and sun dry the meat for hungrier days to add to the staple root crops that she dug on mountainsides.

Much to her mother’s alarm, she would leave their “home” – wherever they would be holing up for the moment – and buy a pineapple or two, slice up the fruits and sell them at retail to other families in hiding. These business ventures would have her walking around. Stubborn and fearless that she was, she would refuse to curtsy and bow to the Japanese soldiers at military sentries, a mandated gesture known as “kumbawa,” another local etymological derivative of the Japanese custom of greeting called konbanwa. This predictably earned the ire of the incomprehensible soldiers who were widely known for their irrational bursts of anger.

Still, she fought back in her own little way and stood her ground. She knew too well that under the Japanese rule, the performance of the bow was a sign of complete subservience to the colonizers and total recognition of their ownership of the Philippines. Her charm must have eventually captivated the soldiers. It was said that missing or skipping this perfunctory bow would cost someone his head by the ever-polished bayonet.

In the swinging 1950s, when the Philippines was enjoying a post-Liberation business boom, she hauled her mother and daughter to the capital city of Manila and single-handedly opened what would be the biggest fruit distributorship outlet in one of the major public markets in the city. Her incomes grew exponentially as she fearlessly augmented her products to include black market American brand cigarettes. In a time when the police was considered an indubitable force to reckon with, she defied all threats that sprang from her not willing to be a victim of police extortion.

With her mother gone and her daughter married in the 1980s, she decided to retire from the harried life of tending to business everyday. She was getting old. Her strength and energy became directly proportional to what was left of her waning business.

She bought herself a small piece of land in the far outskirts of the city where the sharp-edged cogon grass was taller than humans. She saw what remains of her future in a place that was not even fit for humans. During the following months, she single-handedly hewed the tall grass till only the moist reddish earth was visible. Every morning, she walked around on the hillsides, lugging two large empty bags, and proceeded to pick up huge stones. In no time at all, she was able to fill up her small patch of land with a landfill of those stones. A small nipa hut soon stood on the land. Several fruit trees and flowering bushes started to grow, too. The nipa hut would later turn into a small concrete structure that she called her spanking new home.

There she would spend the last years of her life, fighting the chill from the nearby mountains, fighting the greedy government agencies that saw the potential of the erstwhile uninhabitable lands on the hills, and fighting the thought that, in the end, she is really left all by her lonesome. Her daughter’s father was in a faraway city, with his real family.

She simply played the cards that were dealt her – and played them marvelously.

Till her last dying breath, she fought back. All within a span of thirty minutes, she died twice before the third and fatal cardiac arrest, brain dead on the second. On the evening of June 3, she passed away at 93 – still a rose upon a hard rock.

At last, policy makers are awakened into the reality that currently bites the Philippines. Economic planners are trimming growth targets. It isn’t these targets, however, that ordinary Filipinos find mind-boggling. The planners and policy movers have always had a penchant for making targets anyway, elevating the effort to the level of a sport. It looks, though, that they had been making plans either in slumber or in a half-awakened state. Being in climate-controlled luxury cars and excellently airconditioned homes and offices can, indeed, induce a narcotic, numbing, and trance-like effect.

The ordinary Pinoy finds sick humor in television ads and cinema ads where the president of his country is seen smiling from ear to ear (to match a professionally done make-up and expertly coiffed crowning glory that projects a beaming leader) in cross-fade frames along with animated graphs and statistical figures that visualize a smiling, swimming, and swooning economic upturn (constant and consistent) in the past few months. Along with these images are a series of shots of government institutions that have supposedly been furiously addressing, albeit just recently, the country’s economic blight.

To the ordinary Pinoy, this is not only sickening; it makes his heart sink. But because Filipinos are wont to just laugh off their problems (probably, out of an attitude of being resigned to the fact that is, in turn, an after-effect of centuries-long subservience to colonial rule), the sickening images are merely taken as sick humor. Those images and statistics are lost on the ordinary Filipino because from the time he opens his eyes in the morning till the minute he rests his weary body at night, he knows a different set of facts.

He only knows lower-digit numbers in his economic realities, not ones that can be exponentially configured into statistics. Being destitute, he does not know that far.

Long before the price of rice went up, the ever-dependable instant noodles have also become staple food for poor Filipinos. A pack of instant noodles comes at about 5 pesos. A poor family of five people will have roughly about four packs a day. The taxicab driver will have to ask his passengers for a few extra bucks additional to the metered fare because it has become impossible for him to recoup his gasoline expenses. To the passenger, this means the equivalent of 30 to 40 pesos to show his generosity. Many primary and high school students, in both the countryside and urban poor areas, are forced to quit school because their families can hardly come up with financial requirements needed to sustain schooling. The school I.D. and other seemingly necessary requirements will come up to around 200 pesos more for low-income families.

While the country’s economic planners speak in terms of inflation, export, import, Dubai crude oil prices, and strong peso, the ordinary Pinoy can only utter the price of rice, price of canned sardines, price of instant noodles, cost of public jeepney fare, additional financial requirements in public schools that are supposed to give free education, and the ridiculously escalating price of gas partly due to an imposed 12% expanded value-added tax over and above the ridiculously escalating cost of foreign oil.

It would do a world of good if all Filipinos call a spade a spade. But I am not sure which is more expedient for the sake of having a unified country: for the poor to understand economic terminology or for the ones in power and authority to have their ear to the ground.

Tags: Poverty, Economy, Philippines