Race Is On to Write Guidance to Contain First Ship-borne Hantavirus Outbreak

 As the cruise ship hit by a hantavirus outbreak sails towards Tenerife, World Health Organization officials are racing to draw up step-by-step guidance for what should happen next for the nearly 150 passengers when they ⁠finally reach land on Sunday.

The hantavirus outbreak – which has killed three people among at least eight suspected or confirmed infections - is the first ever recorded on a cruise ship, so some new protocols are needed.

Half a dozen current and former WHO ⁠officials and hantavirus experts said the outbreak could be managed by adapting standard public health steps, like isolating sick passengers or those who may have been in contact with them. None of the passengers ⁠on the ship now have symptoms, the ship's operator has said.

TIPS ‌FROM ARGENTINA

Officials are also seeking tips from Argentina, where a previous outbreak of the Andes virus, the same strain as on the ship, was snuffed out in 2019. 

“If we follow public health measures and the lessons we learned from Argentina ... we can break this chain of transmission. This doesn't need to be a large epidemic,” Abdi Rahman Mahamud, director of the WHO's alert and response coordination department, said.

He said the focus was on isolation for sick people, and monitoring and quarantining for other passengers, subject to national government decisions. 

The WHO may also ‌recommend that some people with links to the outbreak take their temperature daily for at least 42 days as the Andes strain has a ​long incubation period, ‌Anais Legand, WHO technical officer for viral threats, said at an online briefing on ‌Friday.

National authorities may also be asked to set up regular contact with those people, and give them a phone number to call if they feel at all unwell, she added. 

Passengers are being split into high-risk and ⁠low-risk contacts based on their interactions with sick travellers, the WHO said. Contact-tracing is also key for ‌any who have left the ship already.  

The Andes hantavirus ⁠is known to spread through close and prolonged contact, and chiefly ​when a patient is already symptomatic. That information is based largely on the ‌one outbreak where the Andes virus spread between people in Argentina in 2018-19, in which 34 people were infected and 11 died. 

“We essentially learned that once you implement basic measures of social distancing, that are essentially very simple – stay home when you are not feeling well – that diminished the circulation and the outbreak burned out,” said Gustavo Palacios, ​a professor at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, in the United States, who is originally from Argentina and a ‌co-author ‌of a key paper on that outbreak.

He and others have been advising WHO on the outbreak since May 2, he said, adding he hoped more attention would now be paid ‌to the risks of hantaviruses, which can have ​fatality rates of up to 50%.  

SOME PLANS IN PLACE

Some governments are already making plans: the UK government said on Friday morning it would repatriate its citizens on a flight under strict infection-control measures, and then passengers would be asked to isolate for 45 days, with testing as required. 

Krutika Kuppalli, associate professor of medicine ⁠at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in the U.S., who formerly worked on mpox protocols at the WHO, said measures ‌could be taken from previous outbreaks.

“It’s the same principle as for measles, or Ebola. Contact tracing doesn’t change,” she said.

The WHO said late on Thursday it was still finalizing ​guidelines.

https://www.medscape.com/s/viewarticle/experts-race-write-guidance-contain-first-ship-borne-2026a1000exo

'Does Vaping Cause Cancer?'

 A scientific review has raised fresh concerns about the long-term cancer risks of vaping, concluding that e-cigarettes are probably carcinogenic, while also acknowledging significant gaps in the evidence.

The analysis of reviews and single studies published since 2017 concluded that nicotine vaping “likely” contributes to oral and lung cancers. But the actual risks and how they compare with those from smoking are impossible to calculate at this point. 

E-cigarettes are relatively new, having hit the market about 20 years ago. Unlike the case with tobacco use, where decades of epidemiological data firmly establish its cancer risk, long-term population studies of e-cigarette users are lacking.

“Sufficient time to reveal any consequential burden of cancer wholly attributable to vaping has not yet passed,” said Bernard Stewart, PhD, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, who led the review.

The upshot, in the words of one researcher, is that society is in the midst of a “natural experiment” to see what the ultimate health risks of vaping are.

The State of the Evidence

When first introduced, e-cigarettes were touted as being a less harmful alternative to traditional smoking and possibly a way to help smokers quit. A recent Cochrane Review concluded that nicotine-based vaping can, in fact, boost quit rates compared with nicotine replacement products.

And on May 5, the FDA announced a first: It authorized the marketing of fruit-flavored vapes, citing a need for an “expanded array of flavored options” for adults who want to give up traditional cigarettes.

At the same time, no e-cigarette product is FDA-approved for smoking cessation, and health authorities have for years raised concerns about vape marketing that targets adolescents, as well as the lack of data on long-term health risks.

Enter the new review, published in Carcinogenesis. Stewart’s team compiled the most up-to-date evidence on the “carcinogenicity” of e-cigarettes, using biomarker studies of people who vape, case reports, animal research, and analyses of e-cigarette aerosols.

Starting with people: Numerous studies have established that vapers are exposed to known or suspected carcinogens. E-cigarette users have elevated urinary markers of volatile organic compounds, such as acrylamide and acrylonitrile, vs nonusers. They also have higher levels of metals such as lead and cadmium, as well as certain polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

In nearly all of those cases, vapers show far lower exposure than cigarette smokers do. Still, biomarker studies have pointed to potential consequences from e-cigarette chemical exposures, including elevated indicators of DNA damage, oxidative stress, chronic inflammation, and epigenetic changes in tissue samples from vapers compared with controls (typically identified as nonsmokers).

Meanwhile, lab studies of e-cigarette aerosols have turned up all 10 “key characteristics” of carcinogens, including the capacity to alter DNA repair, induce inflammation, and suppress immune system activity. And based on animal research, exposure to those aerosols can cause lung tumors.

The main gap? Data on human cancer are scarce. Stewart and his colleagues cite case reports of oral cancers among people who vaped for over a decade. And together with the other data sources, they consider the evidence strong enough to call e-cigarettes a likely contributor to oral and lung cancer risk.

But to “move beyond isolated case reports,” the researchers say, longitudinal studies linking e-cigarette use to cancer incidence in population-based registries are necessary.

The review was restricted to nicotine-delivering e-cigarettes and did not assess marijuana vaping. There is early research suggesting that cannabis aerosols trigger inflammation, apoptosis, and “cancer pathways” in human bronchial cells, but the evidence base is even more limited than that for e-cigarettes.

Why Certainty Remains Elusive

A chief reason for the uncertainty is the long latency of cancer.

“The evidence from biomarkers is consistent, but the magnitude of the effect long term in human studies will likely take much more time to be known,” Michael Chaiton, PhD, of the Center for Addiction and Mental Health and Ontario Tobacco Research Unit, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, told Medscape Medical News. 

Product variation is another factor. E-cigarettes differ in device design and e-liquid composition, while user behavior varies, too — all of which make it difficult to quantify exposure or compare studies.

It’s also tough to tease out the effects of e-cigarettes, per se, from those of cigarette smoking, because many people are “dual users,” Stewart pointed out. 

Chaiton agreed, noting that this type of research is “inherently tricky.”

“It’s hard to find large groups of people who have never smoked cigarettes but have been frequent vapers for a long time,” he said. “That’s particularly true for older people.” 

Essentially, Chaiton said, “as a society, we are currently running a natural experiment,” where health risks attributable to vaping itself may only become clear in younger cohorts.

The Bottom Line

While many questions remain, it is safe to make certain assumptions based on the existing evidence, according to Chaiton.

“First,” he said, “there are harms associated with vaping exposure compared to non-exposure. Second, harms associated with vaping will be less than harms associated with smoking for most diseases, including cancer. The level of biomarker exposure is good evidence for that.”

However, the relative disease risks — how much worse is vaping than nonuse and how much better is it than smoking nonexposure — remain to be seen, Chaiton said. And those are critical unknowns from a public health standpoint. 

“The challenge,” Chaiton said, “is that from a policy perspective, it does make a difference if vaping is 30% as harmful as smoking, or 5%.”

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/does-vaping-cause-cancer-2026a1000euv

US and Korea sign shipbuilding pact

 The United States and South Korea signed a Memorandum of Understanding to expand cooperation in shipbuilding, the US Department of Commerce's International Trade Administration (ITA) announced in a statement.

The agreement establishes the Korea-US Shipbuilding Partnership Initiative, which is said to promote collaboration in "workforce training, industrial modernization and maritime investment," the agency said.

Oversight will be provided by US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and Republic of Korea Minister of Trade, Industry and Resources Jung-kwan Kim, with a new partnership center expected to open later this year in Washington DC.

https://breakingthenews.net/Article/US-and-Korea-sign-shipbuilding-pact/66257434

HNTI: Nobody Knows Anything, The Beatles edition

 by Barry Ritholtz

 

 

The paperback of “How NOT to Invest” drops this week; to celebrate, this whole week I am running various stories and excerpts about the book. 

This short, Beatles-related excerpt from the book was one of my favorite chapters to write… Enjoy!

 

Is there any greater gap between “Expert Opinion” and subsequent history than The Beatles?

AllMusic sums up the Fab Four as “The most popular and influential rock act of all time, a band that blazed several new trails for popular music.”1 That’s obvious today, but it was not the consensus early in their career.

Many amusing details were recounted by Bob Seawright is his “Better Letter.” Nobody skewers humanity’s cognitive failings with more amusing flair than Seawright. He giddily recounted the early reviews of the Beatles when they first came to America. At the time, they had five singles in Britain’s Top 20, three of which hit #1 – all in 1963. Their debut album, “Please Please Me,” held the top spot on Britain’s charts for 30 weeks, displaced only by the band’s next album, “With the Beatles.“

Despite the sensation they were causing in Great Britain, The Beatles’ record label (EMI) could not persuade its American counterpart (Capitol) to release any of the band’s singles in the States. Dave Dexter was the man in charge of international A&R for Capitol, and ostensibly an industry expert on the public’s musical tastes. He repeatedly rejected The Beatles’ singles, calling them “generally amateurish and unappealing.” One after another, Dexter vetoed those singles tearing up the charts in the UK, starting with “Please Please Me” and “She Loves You.”

Ed Sullivan had also turned down the Fab Four (twice) for his television show. He was by coincidence at London (now Heathrow) Airport when he witnessed “Beatlemania” firsthand. The band was returning home from a tour in Sweden, greeted by a raucous, screaming mob of teenage girls. That convinced Sullivan to book the lads.2

The Ed Sullivan Show was a huge platform for breaking new acts, and Capitol decided to release “I Want to Hold Your Hand” a few weeks before The Beatles’ appearance. This was not some insightful exec reversing Dexter’s misguided rejections or a change of musical heart but rather, simply good corporate opportunism. How could you not capitalize on the demand one of the country’s most popular TV shows might create?

And how did the Sullivan Show go? 3

The Beatles played five songs on two broadcast segments, ending with “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”  Ray Bloch, Ed Sullivan’s musical director, was unimpressed: “The only thing different is the hair, as far as I can see. I give them a year.” 4

He was not alone in panning the appearance. Seawright collected a string of headlines and reviews that have not aged particularly well:

The New York Herald Tribune: “BEATLES BOMB ON TV.”

The Boston Globe: “Don’t let the Beatles bother you. If you don’t think about them they will go away and in a few more years they will probably be bald.”

The New York Times: “The Beatles’ vocal quality can be described as hoarsely incoherent, with the minimal enunciation necessary to communicate the schematic texts.”

The Los Angeles Times: “Not even their mothers would claim that they sing well.”

The New York Herald Tribune: “75 percent publicity, 20 percent haircut and 5 percent lilting lament.”

Talk about “Nobody Knows Anything.”

It wasn’t just that the reviews missed the mark. What is noteworthy is all of biases evident in those critiques. This is also evident in the prior section on Media (later on, we explore what causes this).

Consider Newsweek:

“Visually they are a nightmare, tight, dandified Edwardian-Beatnik suits and great pudding bowls of hair. Musically they are a near disaster, guitars and drums slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony and melody.” (emphasis added)

Whether you like their songs or not, The Beatles’ harmonies and melodies are simply not debatable. The musicality and beauty of their songs is simply beyond reproach.

And this was The Washington Post revealing their inside-the-beltway angle:

“They are, apparently, part of some kind of malicious, bi-lateral entertainment trade agreement. The British have to sit through dozens of dreadful American television programs. In return, we get The Beatles. As usual, we got gypped. Nothing we have exported in recent years quite justifies imported hillbillies who look like sheep dogs and sound like alley cats in agony.”

What was the 1960s equivalent of “Okay, Boomer”…? 5

You probably know what happened next: “I Want to Hold Your Hand” went to number one in the U.S., quickly selling a million copies.5 American tastes were not so different than Britain’s after all, and Beatlemania became a cultural phenomenon here too.6

***

Ironically, these music “experts” missed the biggest cultural shift in generations, and it was happening right before their eyes and ears. How did they blow it? In his book “Hit Makers,” 7 Derek Thompson explains Raymond Loewy’s concept of MAYA: New products that are “most advanced yet acceptable.”8

Loewy “believed that consumers are torn between two opposing forces: neophilia, a curiosity about new things; and neophobia, a fear of anything too new. As a result, they gravitate to products that are bold, but instantly comprehensible.” Any innovation too far ahead of the curve gets rejected by much of the public.

But with music, I suspect that MAYA line varies with age. The receptiveness to new music is different for a critic in their 40s or 50s than for teenagers. One group is still in its formative age, embracing new things (while rejecting most of what their parents liked); the others’ formative years were decades earlier. Once your musical taste hardens, you may be less receptive to the latest sounds.

This might explain the bad reviews from Beatles’ critics throughout their career. Many of their albums, including some of the best music ever recorded, were initially panned. Musicologist and Historian Ted Gioia observed that critics “literally were handed the greatest recordings of their era to review, and blew them off. Every classic song on these albums was not only attacked, but actually mocked.” 9

MAYA helps explain why.

Gioia notes that The Beatles were “punished for how quickly they were pushing rock music ahead . . . the critics misunderstood the lads from Liverpool for the worst possible reason – namely, that they were constantly learning, growing more ambitious, and willing to take risks.”

Or as UK rocker Elvis Costello said, “Every [Beatles] record was a shock.” 10

The Ed Sullivan appearance was merely a single episode in an explosive career. Throughout the 1960s, bad reviews of Beatles’ albums such as Sgt. Peppers, The White Album, and Abbey Road would come back to haunt the critics who penned them…

 

 

 

Previously:
HNTI: Never Take Candy from Strangers (May 7, 2026)

How NOT to Invest’s 10 Most Important Ideas (May 6, 2026)

Adventures in Recording an Audio Book (May 5, 2026)

How NOT to Invest Paperback Arrives! (May 4, 2026)

Nobody Knows Anything (Full archive)

https://ritholtz.com/2026/05/hnti-nobody-knows-anything-the-beatles-edition/

 

Iran may be releasing oil into sea amid export strain - Fox

Observers cited in a Fox News report said on Friday a large oil slick detected near Iran’s Kharg Island may be linked to operational strain in the country’s oil export system, with satellite images showing a spread of oil in the Persian Gulf.

Others said ageing infrastructure and the use of older vessels for storage or transport could also be contributing factors. The exact cause of the slick has not been independently confirmed.

REGIME RUPTURE: Experts say Iran may be dumping oil as US blockade puts Tehran regime under growing pressure. Report by @EfratLachter https://t.co/Z4fmewHezi

— Fox News World (@FNCGlobalNews) May 8, 2026

https://www.iranintl.com/en/liveblog/202605087268

 

Putin: Ukraine's attack on Rostov was act of terrorism

 Russian President Vladimir Putin stated on Friday that Ukraine's attack on Russia's Rostov region is "another act of terrorism," claiming that the strike on the Rostov Regional Air Traffic Management Center could have impacted the safety of civilian aircraft.

"Early this morning, the Kiev regime committed another act, clearly of a terrorist nature. Specifically, it struck the Rostov Regional Air Traffic Management Center. This could certainly have impacted the safety of civilian aircraft. Fortunately, no tragic events occurred thanks to the highly professional work of our air traffic controllers," Putin said during a security council meeting.

The Russian president's comments come amid the ongoing ceasefire with Ukraine, while Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha stated that Moscow has already violated the ceasefire that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said started on May 6.

https://breakingthenews.net/Article/Putin:-Ukraine's-attack-on-Rostov-was-act-of-terrorism/66256268

New AI trade is leaving Nvidia and Micron in the dust

Nvidia (NVDA) and Micron (MU) have become two of the defining stocks of the AI boom. But a come-from-behind trade in old-school storage has outrun both, with Western Digital (WDC) and Seagate Technology (STX) leading the charge.

Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, Western Digital and Seagate have outperformed Nvidia and Micron, according to Yahoo Finance data.
Western Digital and Seagate Technologies have outperformed Nvidia and Micron since ChatGPT launch

The timing is key. The storage rally really took off in April 2025. Around the same time, Micron and the broader memory trade started to emerge as a central AI theme after the post-”Liberation Day” lows.

That’s not because storage and memory suddenly became sexier than GPUs. It’s because AI has turned the less glamorous parts of the hardware stack into scarcity trades.

The market is moving past the first AI winners and chasing companies tied to the physical demands of the infrastructure build-out: memory, storage, networking, foundry capacity, optical gear, and legacy chips.

The heat map tells the same story, with some of the biggest moves coming from names that were not the face of the AI trade even one year ago.
AI trade heat map — since ChatGPT launched November 30, 2022 · Yahoo Finance

The catch-up trade is showing up across the chip complex. Intel (INTC) is up roughly 200% since the March 30 low and just hit its fourth straight intraday record high following a report that Apple (AAPL) and Intel reached a preliminary chipmaking agreement.

Micron, meanwhile, is up roughly 130% since the March 30 low and has added roughly $470 billion in market value over that stretch. AMD (AMD) and SanDisk (SNDK) have also posted triple-digit rallies, while Lumentum (LITE) is riding a 13-month win streak.


Nvidia still dominates by size. The stock has added more than $1 trillion in market value since the March 30 low alone.

But the performance race has moved beyond the initial AI winners. The market is now paying up for the companies that can help relieve the bottlenecks created by the boom.

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/this-new-ai-trade-is-leaving-nvidia-and-micron-in-the-dust-204250157.html