By Boston Globe Staff and Wires, 4/27/2003

Bay State teachers win national award

Two Massachusetts teachers will be honored at the Milken Family Foundation National Educator Awards this week. Mary Cowhey, a teacher at Jackson Street School in Northampton, and Michael Stanton, a teacher at Ralph Talbot Primary School in South Weymouth, will each receive $25,000 from the foundation. Cowhey and Stanton are among 100 educators nationwide who will be recognized for their achievements at a ceremony in Los Angeles tomorrow.

Local students give money to Indians

Students from Boston-area high schools have raised more than $3,500 to donate to the Yanomami, an indigenous tribe in the Amazon on the Brazil-Venezuela border. One of the world's last hunter-gatherer tribes, the Yanomami lived in near-total isolation for about 2,000 years until the late 1970s, when Brazil's military government conducted surveys in the area. An estimated 26,000 still live in the jungles. Students first heard of the tribe in November when they met with three Yanomami teachers who were visiting the United States. Students from five high schools raised money by selling products made by a Guatamalan weaving cooperative, holding bake sales, and selling coffees and teas at school functions, according to Lisa Matthews, who works with the Cultural Survival Education Program. The money will help literacy among the tribe.

Chelmsford senior wins scholarship

Chelmsford High School senior Anne S. Yu, 18, was awarded a $16,000 scholarship from the Siemens Foundation last week. She was among 16 students nationwide selected for the annual Siemens National Merit Scholarship. Winners were selected based on academic records, test scores, school recommendations, and contributions to their community. Yu is editor-in-chief of her school yearbook and has worked on the student newspaper for three years. In addition to her school activities, Yu has volunteered at Emerson Hospital in Concord and spent two summers volunteering at the Schepens Eye Research Institute in Boston. She has been accepted to MIT, Duke University, and Dartmouth College.

This story ran on page H2 of the Boston Globe on 4/27/2003. © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

Boston.com By Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff, 4/27/2003

TORONTO - Canceled theater tickets and poker nights have given way to canceled weddings, as crestfallen brides discover they can bring the groom to the altar but can't coax out-of-town friends and relatives to risk the trip to Toronto for fear of SARS.

''We'd planned for June, but keep getting frantic e-mails and calls - `Is it safe?' Everyone's frightened by the idea of Toronto, especially our loved ones in the States,''' said Kathleen McKay, 27, a commercial artist originally from Quebec.

''So now we're wondering whether to make it next year. In Montreal. I mean, who wants to get married in an empty church?''

At Union Station, Canada's biggest rail hub, some arriving passengers slip on surgical masks, or simply clamp a handkerchief over nose and mouth before braving the streets.

''When someone sneezes on the commuter car, people react like it's a gunshot,'' said James Stevens, 39, an executive with one of the city's financial firms. ''Everyone flinches, and eyes go wide.''

Chinese restaurants, which have been all but deserted for weeks, have taken to airing desperate radio ads boasting of disinfected tables and sterilized napkins rather than promoting flavorful salt-and-pepper shrimp or General Tao's Chicken. ''At Mandarin, we have a longstanding tradition of being masters of good health,'' goes one blurb, run by a well-known buffet chain.

Health officials insisted last week that severe acute respiratory syndrome has been all but conquered in Toronto, the country's largest city and its financial center - with 4.6 million people in the metropolitan area, and about half of Canada's corporate headquarters. Yet the city continues to be pilloried and shunned.

There have been 20 SARS deaths in and around Toronto, and at least 268 people have been infected with the disease, by far the worst outbreak of the virulent virus outside Asia.

Residents of the proud Queen City are reeling.

''It's like living in a leper colony,'' said Darsit Singh, a 32-year-old construction engineer. ''I have to keep calling home to India - India! - reassuring my family, `Hey, it's OK, no one's dying in the streets.'''

The World Health Organization stunned Canada last week by issuing a strong warning against ''unnecessary'' travel to Toronto because of the risk of contracting the virus that causes SARS.

Government leaders and public health officials voiced outrage at the advisory, which effectively placed Toronto at the same level of international alarm as such SARS hot zones as Beijing and southern China, where the disease has spread much farther and has exacted a far deadlier toll.

Last week, Mayor Mel Lastman, a blustery former TV pitchman, lashed out at the United Nations health body in an interview with CNN: ''They've never even been to Toronto; they're located somewhere in Geneva,'' he said. ''They're hurting Toronto badly.''

In headlines abroad and at home, Toronto has been dubbed the ''Pariah City'' in this frightening SARS spring. To wit:

British Airways crews have been instructed to stay out of Toronto hotels and to travel to Montreal instead.

Some cruise ship lines in the Caribbean have announced that they will not accept Torontonians as passengers.

Several conference organizers in the United States are starting to demand that anyone from southern Ontario wanting to attend must bring a medical certificate proving he or she isn't infected by SARS.

Australia, Britain, France, Ireland, and Venezuela are among countries that have advised citizens against venturing into southern Ontario. (The United States has advised travelers crossing the northern border to avoid hospitals, to pack a first aid kit, and to wash their hands frequently.)

In Massachusetts, the Marian Fathers religious order has asked 450 pilgrims from Toronto to stay away from an annual outdoor Mass officials scheduled for today at the Shrine of Divine Mercy in the Berkshires.

''Even US baseball teams visiting the Blue Jays have been warned not to mingle with fans,'' the National Post said in a gloomy editorial. ''The WHO advisory can only compound the economic fallout the SARS scare has already wrought in Ontario.''

Toronto hotels are facing the worst slump in occupancy rates experienced anywhere in North America since the 9/11 terror attacks, with more than 70 percent of rooms empty in some cases.

''The SARS outbreak is creating not just a public health crisis; it has become a jobs crisis in Toronto's hospitality industry,'' said Paul Clifford of Toronto's hotel and restaurant union.

Economic analysts fear the damage done by SARS will reverbrate through the entire Canadian economy. David Dodge, governor of the Bank of Canada, warned that national economic growth will be slowed significantly this year because of SARS.

Ted Carmichael, chief Canadian economist with J. P. Morgan Securities Canada Inc., estimated that the outbreak would siphon billions of dollars from the economy and would cut economic growth across the country by half this year.

Public health officials said that Toronto has turned the corner in its fight against SARS, thanks to fast action by physicians and dramatic quarantine measures. At one point, more than 10,000 Canadians were under emergency orders to remain at home, often only because of suspicion that they might have been exposed.

''We're seeing an incredible decrease in the curve, I don't think there is a crisis anymore,'' said Dr. Donald Low, chief microbiologist at Toronto's Mount Sinai Hospital and one of the physicians at the forefront of the battle to contain SARS.

As eight new cases were reported in Toronto late last week, however, Ontario Public Health Commissioner James Young acknowledged, ''We're not out of the woods yet.''

Under intense pressure from the Canadian government, the World Health Organization indicated that on Tuesday it will review its warning against travel to Toronto, according to Canadian officials.

But a top official yesterday said yesterday that the outbreak in southern Ontario is still regarded as one of the most serious in the world. And the organization is especially concerned that the disease might continue to spill from Canada into the United States and other countries. A nursing assistant from Ontario died last week in the Philippines after contracting the disease in Toronto. Her father also died.

There is growing concern among epidemiologists that the Canada strain of SARS may be more virulent than those in Asia.

Canada remained adamant that the economically-devastating travel warning is unwarranted. ''We all believe that the World Health Organization came to the wrong conclusion,'' Prime Minister Jean Chretien told reporters. ''We believe that Toronto is a good place to visit and it is a safe place.''

SARS, which has a mortality rate of about 6 percent, has killed 293 people and has infected about 5,000 in more than 20 countries since first appearing in China's Guangdong Province in November, according to official figures.

SARS arrived in Toronto on Feb. 23, borne by a 78-year-old grandmother who was returning to suburban Scarborough after a trip to Hong Kong, where she contracted the virus from another guest at the Metropole Hotel. The grandmother, Kwan Sui-Chu, died at home on March 5, with the coroner listing ''heart failure'' as the cause, paying no attention to the flu-like symptoms she had suffered.

But Kwan's 43-year-old son, Tse Chi Kwai, contracted the mystery ailment and was taken to Scarborough Grace Hospital, where he came in contact with an estimated 200 doctors, nurses, health technicians, and fellow patients before his ailment was recognized for what it was - a new killer virus hitherto confined to China.

Since then, however, Canadian public health officials insist that the disease has been confined to an ''index'' of persons known to have been exposed directly or indirectly to the original Toronto victims. At least 66 of those infected with SARS in the Toronto area are health professionals.

''There is no evidence of casual transmission of SARS in Toronto and every case can be linked back to the index case,'' said Dr. Paul Gully of Health Canada, the federal Health Ministry.

This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 4/27/2003.

By Geoffrey Cowley NEWSWEEK

    May 5 issue —  SARS may have dominated the headlines last week, but it wasn’t the only weird disease on the World Health Organization’s radar screen. In central Africa, an outbreak of the dreaded Ebola fever had stretched into its fifth month. In Belgium and the Netherlands, a virulent new strain of avian flu was wiping out entire chicken farms. Dutch farmers recently slaughtered 18 million birds in hopes of stopping the outbreak. Yet the bird flu has spread to several provinces and jumped from poultry to pigs and even people, causing 83 human cases. Most of the infected people have suffered only eye inflammation, but some have developed respiratory illness. One of them, a 57-year-old veterinary surgeon, recently died of pneumonia. “Bird flu virus was... found in the lungs,” according to an April 19 statement from the Dutch Agriculture Ministry, “and no other cause of death could be detected.” Sound familiar?     Has the SARS epidemic caused you to change your lifestyle at all? Yes, I've changed my travel plans to avoid SARS-stricken cities Not much, but I bought a protective face mask--just in case Not at all

Vote to see results Has the SARS epidemic caused you to change your lifestyle at all?* 19703 responses Yes, I've changed my travel plans to avoid SARS-stricken cities 21% Not much, but I bought a protective face mask--just in case 5% Not at all 74% Survey results tallied every 60 seconds. Live Votes reflect respondents' views and are not scientifically valid surveys.

	        SARS. Ebola. Avian flu. The parade of frightening new maladies continues, each one confirming that our species, for all its cleverness, still lives at the mercy of the microbe. It didn’t seem that way 30 years ago—not with smallpox largely defeated, AIDS still undreamed of and medical science evolving at an unprecedented clip. But even as optimists proclaimed victory over the germ, our megacities, factory farms, jet planes and blood banks were opening broad new avenues for infection. The dark side of progress is now unmistakable; many of the advances that have made our lives more comfortable have also made them more dangerous. Some 30 new diseases have cropped up since the mid-1970s—causing tens of millions of deaths—and forgotten scourges have resurfaced with alarming regularity. “Infectious diseases will continue to emerge,” the Institute of Medicine declares in a new report, warning that complacency and inaction could lead to a “catastrophic storm” of contagion. So what’s to be done? As the SARS outbreak has shown, surveillance is critical. By spotting new infections wherever they occur, and working globally to contain them, we can greatly reduce their impact. But is preparedness our ultimate weapon? Do we know enough about the genesis of new diseases to prevent them? Could we avert the next SARS? The next AIDS? What would a reasonable strategy look like?

        We don’t hold all the cards in this game. Most new diseases begin when a person catches something from an animal—a transaction shaped by chance or even the weather. When healthy young adults started dying of a SARS-like syndrome in New Mexico 10 years ago, it took health experts several weeks of intensive lab work to identify the culprit. To the scientists’ amazement, it wasn’t a human pathogen at all. It was a novel member of the hantavirus family, a group of rodent viruses that sometimes spread through the air after rats or mice shed them in their urine. The previous outbreaks had occurred in Asia. So why were people dying in New Mexico? Scientists now believe the American mice had harbored the virus all along but had never been populous enough to scatter infectious doses in people’s toolsheds and basements. What changed the equation that year was El Niño. The ocean disturbance caused an unusually warm winter in the Southwest. The mouse population exploded as a result—and the hantavirus got a free ride.

       Until someone harnesses the jet stream, such accidents are sure to happen. But quirky weather isn’t the greatest threat we face. As ecologists study the causes of disease emergence, they’re finding that human enterprise is a far more significant force. Almost any activity that disrupts a natural environment can enhance the mobility of disease-causing microbes. Consider what happened in the 1980s, when farmers in Venezuela’s Portuguesa state cleared millions of acres of forest to create cropland. The farms drew as many rats and mice as people, and the rodents introduced a deadly new virus into the region. The so-called Guanarito virus causes fever, shock and hemorrhaging. It infected more than 100 people, leaving a third of them dead.

1 / 5 SARS: common questions NBC’s Robert Bazell explains the basics about SARS.2 / 5 China says it will set up health network to combat SARSChina says it will spend $500 million to set up a nationwide health network to combat SARS. NBC’s Ned Colt reports from Beijing.3 / 5 SARS: fear in NYIt is an unwelcome effect in Asian neighborhoods, including New York City’s sizeable Chinatown. NBC’s Brian Williams reports.4 / 5 Asia tries to coordinate SARS planChina is ground zero for SARS, especially the capital of Beijing. NBC’s Ned Colt reports from there.5 / 5 Toronto and SARSThe SARS outbreak has devastated business in Toronto, where restaurants are empty and hotel occupancy rates were already down almost 25 percent. NBC’s Don Lemon reports.

        Malaysian pig farmers had a similar experience in 1999, after they started pushing back the forest to expand their operations. As barns replaced forestland, displaced fruit bats started living in the rafters, bombarding the pigs’ drinking water with a pathogen now known as the Nipah virus. “The pigs developed an explosive cough that became known as the one-mile cough because you could hear it from so far away,” says Mary Pearl, president of the Wildlife Trust in Palisades, N.Y. The virus soon spread from the pigs to their keepers, causing extreme brain inflammation and killing 40 percent of the affected people. The outbreak ended when Malaysian authorities closed eight farms and slaughtered a million pigs.         The point is not that rain forests are dangerous. It’s that blindly rearranging ecosystems can be hazardous to our health—whether we’re in the Amazon Basin or the woods of Connecticut. That’s where Lyme disease emerged, and it, too, is a product of the way we user our land. Borrelia burg-dorferi, the bacterium that causes Lyme, lives in the bodies of deer and white-footed mice, passing between those animals in the heads of biting ticks. People have crossed paths with all these critters for generations, yet the first known case of Lyme disease dates back only to 1975. Why did we suddenly become vulnerable? Richard Ostfeld, an animal ecologist at the Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, N.Y., has tied the event to suburban development. In open woodlands, foxes and bobcats keep a lid on the Lyme agent by hunting the mice that carry it. But the predators vanish when developers chop woodlands into subdivisions, and the mice and their ticks proliferate unnaturally. In a recent survey of woodlots in New York, Ostfeld found that infected ticks were some seven times as prevalent on —one- and two-acre lots as they were on lots of 10 to 15 acres. His bottom line: “You’re more likely to get Lyme disease in Scarsdale than the Catskills.” May 5, 2003 Issue Cover: SARS--What You Need to Know •  The Mystery of SARS •  How Progress Makes Us Sick •  Economies on Empty        Fortunately, you’re not likely to spread it in either place. Even when a microbe succeeds at leaping from one species to another, the new host is often a dead end. Neither Nipah nor Guanarito can spread from person to person. The hantaviruses have the same problem. And a tick could suck on a Lyme-disease patient all day without getting enough bacteria to infect its next host. The infections we get from primates and pigs are a whole different story. When the Ebola virus jumps from an ape into a person, it often races through a family or a hospital before burning itself out. And HIV is still spreading steadily after three decades of person-to-person transmission. It has infected some 60 million people since crossing over from chimpanzees, and its emergence was no fluke of the weather. We placed ourselves in the path of the virus, we moved it around the world, and we’re well poised to do it again.

 fact file  SARS virus cases

Number of people affected by the flu-like virus Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) worldwide. As of May 1, 2003 | 1 | 2 | 3 Country Cases* Deaths Recovered China 3,638 170 1,351 Hong Kong 1,600 162 834 Singapore 201 25 143 Canada 147 20 87 Taiwan 89 3 25 Vietnam 63 5 56 USA 54   23 Italy 9   4 Thailand 7 2 5 Germany 7   7 Malaysia 6 2 3| 1 | 2 | 3 Country Cases* Deaths Recovered Britain 6   6 Mongolia 6   3 France 5   1 Philippines 4 2 1 Australia 4   4 Sweden 3   2 Brazil 2   2 Indonesia 2   1 Japan 2     Bulgaria 1     India 1   1| 1 | 2 | 3 Country Cases* Deaths Recovered Ireland 1   1 Kuwait 1   1 Macao 1     Poland 1     Romania 1   1 South Africa 1     South Korea 1     Spain 1   1 Switzerland 1   1

• Includes number of deaths, recoveries and current cases Source: World Health Organization Printable version        The human AIDS viruses are descended from simian pathogens known as SIVs. HIV-1 is essentially a chimpanzee virus, while HIV-2 (a rarer and milder bug) comes from the sooty mangabey (a monkey). How did the chimp virus make its way into humans? The best guess is that African hunters contracted it while butchering animals, and then passed it on through sexual contact. Until a few decades ago, that hunting accident would have been a local misfortune, a curse played out in a few rural villages. What turned it into a holocaust was not just a new infectious agent but a proliferation of roads, cities and airports, a breakdown of social traditions, and the advent of blood banking and needle sharing. Those conditions virtually sealed HIV’s success, and they continue to rocket obscure bugs into every corner of the world. “The volume and speed of travel are unprecedented,” says Dr. Mary Wilson of Harvard. “We are interconnected in ways that weren’t true a century ago.”

• Learn more about the disease       SARS is only the latest reminder of how powerful those connections can be. The novel coronavirus that causes the syndrome emerged from Guangdong, the same Chinese province that delivers new flu viruses to the world most years. Pigs, ducks, chickens and people live cheek-by-jowl on the district’s primitive farms, exchanging flu and cold germs so rapidly that a single pig can easily incubate human and avian viruses simultaneously. The dual infections can generate hybrids that escape antibodies aimed at the originals, setting off a whole new chain of human infection. The clincher is that these farms sit just a few miles from Guangzhou, a teeming city that mixes people, animals and microbes from the countryside with travelers from around the world. You could hardly design a better system for turning small outbreaks into big ones.         For all the fear it has caused, SARS clearly isn’t the big one, at least not in its current incarnation. The coronavirus that causes it is as nasty as any flu virus, but it doesn’t get around very easily. And as University of Louisville evolutionist Paul Ewald points out, an epidemic can’t sustain itself unless each patient infects more than one other person. “If each SARS case were generating even two others,” he says, “we would have seen hundreds of thousands by now.” A doomsday flu virus would approach the virulence of the SARS agent, but it would infect people by the roomful.

Such pandemic flu viruses have emerged in the past, and many experts believe it’s only a matter of time until it happens again. How can we lessen the danger? A long-term strategy would have to include modernizing the world’s farms, improving basic health care and stockpiling vaccines and antiviral drugs. As science illuminates the ecology of infectious disease, it may also inspire wiser, safer approaches to land use and wilderness preservation. Until then, surveillance will be doubly important. The good news is that the forces making microbes so mobile are also making them easier to track. Ten years ago, quick communication was still a problem for many health departments, says Stephen Morse, director of the Center for Public Health Preparedness at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “A colleague in Russia had a fax but no fax paper. A colleague in Ghana had telex but no fax. In other places they had a telephone but no telex.” Today even the most remote surveillance stations are tied into the Web-based Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases. The world’s largest health agencies have created similar systems for sharing scientific research. Such systems are only as good as the openness and good will of their users. If anything good has come of the SARS scare, it is a renewed commitment to those ideals. How far they’ll take us is still anyone’s guess.

[ The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 4/27/03 ] By MICHAEL E. KANELL

The war with Iraq is over, but the uncertainty is not. And one of the biggest unknowns is how much impact the return of Iraqi oil to the market will have on the wobbly U.S. economy -- and how soon.

A lot is riding on the answer. Optimists say Iraqi oil holds the promise of keeping global energy prices down, limiting the influence of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and offering relief to beleaguered American consumers and companies.

"I think the war changed things in a big way," said economist Ujjayant Chakravorty of Emory University.

Few oil wells were torched by Iraqi troops. No missiles hit Saudi oil fields. No suicide bombers blocked oil ports. As those fears evaporated, the price for oil came down dramatically.

From a prewar flirtation with $40 a barrel, oil prices fell into the mid-$20s.

For a struggling U.S. economy that stumbled again in recent months, the higher prices had threatened a renewed recession, said Rajeev Dhawan, director of the economic forecasting center at Georgia State University

"We definitely dodged the oil bullet," he said.

Still, the ripple from the halt of Iraqi oil production when the war started has yet to even reach U.S. shores.

Oil from Iraq, which had been the fifth-largest supplier to the United States, stopped flowing shortly after the bombs started falling on March 19. Since it takes more than a month for oil to wend its way from the Middle East to the United States, it is too early to assess the effects of the shutdown, said Matt Simmons, chairman and chief executive of Simmons & Company International, a Houston-based energy investment bank.

Oil production in Nigeria has also been disrupted, by political violence.

If the cutbacks in those countries are going to mean higher prices, we should start to see them in the coming days, he said.

Most analysts expect a slow return of Iraqi production and relatively stable oil prices for a few months. And as the flow of Iraqi oil swells, that added supply should nudge prices down.

But there are other possibilities. Many analysts expect the Bush administration to dismantle Iraq's state-run economy in favor of a free market.

Privatization would be a tremendous shock and might delay full production, said Lewis Snider, professor of political science at Claremont University in California, who has lived in the Middle East.

"The politics of this could get really nasty," he said.

The issue is important because timing matters. America's need for gasoline peaks in midsummer.

With most of the world's producers pumping near capacity and the stream from Iraq slowly resuming, gas this year will be available at surprisingly reasonable prices, Snider predicted.

"I don't see too much reason to be anxious about the tightness of supply this summer," he said.

Still, inventories are at historically low levels. With so much oil coming from unreliable places, and with OPEC planning to cut production about 7 percent, an increase in energy needs will leave precious little room between supply and demand, said Jay Hakes, former administrator of the Energy Information Administration.

"I still think we are in the tightest market since the Persian Gulf War. Saudi Arabia helped, but it hasn't offset the oil lost from Iraq."

And other losses are possible.

Balance shifts

Crunch time is from Memorial Day to Labor Day. If all goes right, which includes Iraq starting to export oil and Venezuela and Nigeria staying placid, then there will be enough modestly priced gas for Americans.

Unfortunately, that means depending on a lot of coins to come up heads, Simmons said. "The odds are really low that we will have an easy time."

"This market is very vulnerable to any little disruption," Hakes said. "I think OPEC may be misreading the world market. There is not a good supply of oil out there. That could make for fireworks in the next few months. If gas goes to $2 a gallon, that has an impact on the economy."

Short-term questions aside, the war has shifted the balance of oil power.

Iraq's oil reserves are second only to those in Saudi Arabia. While Iraq's decaying industry struggled in recent months to pump 2 million barrels a day, its capacity could be three times that.

As some war-backers argued, a U.S.-friendly Iraq would erode Saudi Arabia's power to shape prices.

The 2001 Cheney Report on energy argued that America must diversify sources for oil and make sure those sources are dependable. "The policy-makers want to move away from the Middle East -- to the Caspian Sea, to West Africa and Latin America," said Daphne Wyshan, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

A pro-U.S. Iraq would provide one more dependable source. But significant production needs to be resumed first.

Vice President Dick Cheney recently predicted that Iraq will be pumping 2.5 million to 3 million barrels of crude a day by year's end -- better than its production has been for years.

The experts are split on that projection.

First is the problem of legality: Will the United States win United Nations approval to sell Iraqi oil? Would the United States go ahead without an OK?

Niceties of international law aside, dilapidated equipment and transportation bottlenecks could throttle a return to full production, Simmons said. "But it's like a patient who needs an MRI and CAT scan. We just don't know yet."

Even the much-touted estimates of Iraqi reserves are unreliable, he said. "How much oil is there? Nobody has any idea."

Politics plays a role

Iraqi oil's impact may depend more on politics than engineering, said Ken Miller, vice president of Purvin & Gertz, an international energy consulting company in Houston.

With the world's large economies weak, Miller said the supply will overwhelm demand and prices will come down.

For American drivers, the idea of cheaper gasoline sounds delightful. But that could spell political disaster.

Middle East oil producers have built economies around oil dollars. When the price plunges, it can savage the standard of living and undermine the compact between people and rulers.

Some analysts scoff at worries about revolution. Still, the danger is obvious from the numbers, Simmons argued. Saudi Arabia has a burgeoning population and a large royal family that has its own kind of welfare. The nation's income has fallen from about $26,000 per person to $6,500 in less than two decades.

"Do the numbers -- unless they are willing to produce another cash crop, they need an average of 10 million barrels a day at $50 a barrel," Simmons said.

Oil prices didn't get to $50 a barrel last year. But during the winter, higher energy costs were seen as a drain on the finances of consumer and company alike.

Price increases are not as costly to the economy as three decades ago, but America cannot run without oil. When the price goes up, we pay. Only if it stays high for a long time do consumers shift their habits and purchases.

That makes the short-run effect of oil prices potentially painful. So, if OPEC's cut forces oil prices up rapidly, that could put a nasty hole in hopes for a recovery.

The price equation

High oil prices have been a factor in -- or the cause of -- most of the U.S. recessions since World War II. On the other side of the coin, low prices have added fuel to several booms.

While the fall from prewar levels is welcome, oil prices are still far higher than in late 2001 and early 2002. Back then, gas prices in metro Atlanta were below $1 a gallon. Still, if prices don't climb again, that is a very modest kind of good news.

With the U.S. economy struggling -- job losses up and business orders down -- oil prices are not helping, said John Silvia, chief economist of Wachovia Securities. "But it won't hold us back -- we're already stuck in the mud."

Hopes for renewed growth have been pegged to a resurgence in business spending. But companies have been unsure about the future and hesitant to spend, just like consumers. Higher-than-average oil prices only add to uncertainty, said Dwight Allen, a partner at Deloitte Research.

"At least we know we are not in for a dire, acute situation," Allen said. "But the future is as cloudy as it was before."

Allen is telling his corporate clients to come up with several backup plans, to consider various scenarios and to hedge their bets. This is not a time for gambling, big spending or padding payrolls.

"For the next 12 months, you make only a limited commitment," Allen said.

<a href=www.orlandosentinel.com>OrlandoSentinel.com By Pamela J. Johnson | Sentinel Staff Writer Posted April 27, 2003

Armored-catfish study For the first time, the state is conducting a "life-history study" on the species of armored catfish called brown hoplo and its possible effects on other fish in the St. Johns River. The study, which tracks what they eat and how they reproduce, is expected to be completed by year's end.

CHRISTMAS -- Each morning, they arrive for a full day of fishing. On weekends, a long line forms at the boat ramp.

The dedicated fishermen aren't fishing the upper St. Johns River for bass, bluegill or black crappies.

At sunset, they will pack their coolers with armored catfish -- "trash fish" to most locals.

"I wouldn't feed it to my cat," said a disgusted Frank Peacock, an airboat operator from Christmas. "They taste nasty."

But armored catfish is considered a delicacy for fishermen originally from Guyana, who travel from as far as New York to cast their nets in search of them.

That is angering longtime anglers, who say the newcomers have taken over the Highway 50 Boat Ramp in east Orange County and illegally stripped the upper river of game fish with their nets.

Nearly 1,000 people have signed a petition urging state officials to "Stop the Rape and Death of our River by Cast Netters."

The armored-catfish fishermen say they have the proper permits to be there and that the upper St. Johns River is one of the few areas in Florida where the fish can be found.

Fishermen from Guyana at the upper St. Johns River said that armored catfish is in high demand in South American communities in the United States and can be sold for about $10 a pound.

But they said they catch the armored catfish -- covered with tiny dark brown platelets that make them appear dressed for battle -- only to feed their extended families. The fish, also widely found in Trinidad, Martinique, Venezuela, Brazil, Peru and Paraguay, is boiled and the scaly outer skin is removed. It's soaked in lemon juice, stewed in curry and served with rice.

"It's better than ahi tuna," Radesh Arjoon, 32, a truck driver who immigrated from Guyana and lives in DeLand, said recently at the boat ramp. He learned that the upper St. Johns River was a hot spot for armored catfish a year ago, when he lived in New York City.

Arjoon said he has had one run-in with a fisherman who accused him of taking game fish -- which legally can only be caught with a fishing rod.

"They don't like us, and I don't know why," said Arjoon, pouring a few bucketsful of the fish into a cooler after an eight-hour day.

He said his weekly catches feed his wife and three children and sometimes his friends. "With a little curry," he added, "it's really, really good."

Peacock has no use for the fish. He said he routinely went bass fishing in the upper river until the armored catfish and cast netters came along, wiping out the game fish. "No one bothers to bass fish here anymore," he said.

Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission officials say the tropical fish was most likely introduced to the area two years ago by illegal aquarium dumping.

"I wish the cold weather we had would've killed them all," Peacock said of the armored catfish.

In a petition that he sent to state officials, Jon Sharp, a retired technical writer from Christmas, said that a severe drought had left water levels extremely low on the St. Johns River when the armored catfish and the cast netters appeared. Because the water was so low, he said, the nets caught not only catfish, but loads of game fish such as bass and bluegill. But the cast netters didn't throw back the game fish, as legally required, he said.

"The cast netters say they are after armored catfish," Sharp said. "Maybe so, but what happened to all the other fish?"

State officials say there is no evidence that the number of game fish has decreased in the upper river.

"We've done the studies, and there is no smoking gun," said Bob Eisenhauer, a state fisheries biologist based in Melbourne. A year ago, the state analyzed the amounts of different fish species at the upper river and determined that there was no significant decline in game fish, he said.

As a result of the complaints, state law enforcement officers stepped up patrol in the area. In several months, officers issued a handful of citations to cast netters taking game fish or fishing without the proper license.

"We extended a lot of time and effort in responding to the complaints," said Andy Love, a regional commander for the state Fish & Wildlife law-enforcement division. "And we shot down their accusations."

Officer Brian Baine, who works with Love, remembered hiding in bushes and watching the cast netters unload their catch. "I checked them and checked them," Baine said. "And I never could make an arrest."

Baine and others think that the conflict between Florida fishermen and those from other countries is a result of a culture clash.

"Here are these strangers coming in throwing their nets, some of them speaking little English," Baine said. "They just don't like them."

"That's the biggest bunch of baloney I've ever heard," said John Long, an airboat operator from Christmas. "We just don't like what they're doing. I've been fishing here for 40 years, and now you can't even catch supper."

Pamela J. Johnson can be reached at pjohnson@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5171.