Our fame and shame

By Alex P. Vidal

“Festivals cause diseases, since they lighten cares but increase gluttony.”— Apollonius of Tyana

IT looked like we have surpassed the other festivals in the country venerating the feast of the historical child Jesus in many aspects.

Unlike the other festivals, the Iloilo Dinagyang Festival has showcased not only the event’s cultural and religious ingredients, but also heavily the tourism and the rapidly burgeoning beauty pageant.

The Ilonggos’ propensity to innovate and cultivate an aura of competitiveness and easily attract global attention is also manifested in the way the organizers, led by the Iloilo Festivals Foundation, Inc. (IFFI), repackaged and remodeled the myriad of colorful activities that jibe with the socio-cultural, spiritual, and political climate.

The Dinagyang Festival has truly become the Ilonggos’ major source of fame and pride.

It can also be a platform of unity and camaraderie when all sectors chip in their resources and talents.

It can be a source of shame, however, if we can’t sustain its glory and the startup gains due to apathy, neglect, ningas cogon attitude, and politics.

Because of this year’s impressive display of creativity and aesthetics the modern Dinagyang is now on the radar of the universe. We can’t afford to be passive, slow down, relax, and revert back to age-old occultism while technology is on a dizzying speed upward.

To sustain, maintain, and buttress what we have discovered and started is the beginning of true progress and success.

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LATEST ON THE CORONAVIRUS. Snakes—the Chinese krait and the Chinese cobra—could be the original source of the new coronavirus.

This was learned from the The Conversation’s Haitao Guo, Guangxiang “George” Luo and Shou-Jiang Gao.

This was what they reportedly learned: The many-banded krait (Bungarus multicinctus), also known as the Taiwanese krait or the Chinese krait, is a highly venomous species of elapid snake found in much of central and southern China and southeast Asia.

The study of the genetic code of 2019-nCoV reveals that the new virus is most closely related to two bat SARS-like coronavirus samples from China, initially suggesting that — like SARS and MERS — the bat might also be the origin of 2019-nCoV. The authors further found that the viral RNA coding sequence of 2019-nCoV spike protein, which forms the “crown” of the virus particle that recognizes the receptor on a host cell, indicates that the bat virus might have mutated before infecting people.

But when the researchers performed a more detailed bioinformatics analysis of the sequence of 2019-nCoV, it suggests that this coronavirus might come from snakes.

In the case of this coronavirus outbreak, reports state that most of the first group of patients hospitalized were workers or customers at a Wuhan seafood wholesale market which also sold processed meats and live consumable animals including poultry, donkeys, sheep, pigs, camels, foxes, badgers, bamboo rats, hedgehogs and reptiles. However, since no one has ever reported finding a coronavirus infecting aquatic animals, it is plausible that the coronavirus may have originated from other animals sold in that market.

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IT is expected that further international exportation of cases may appear in any country, this was according to the recent meeting of the World Health Organization (WHO) Emergency Committee.

Thus, all countries should be prepared for containment, including active surveillance, early detection, isolation and case management, contact tracing and prevention of onward spread of 2019-nCoV infection, and to share full data with WHO.

Countries are required to share information with WHO according to the IHR.

Technical advice is available here.  Countries should place particular emphasis on reducing human infection, prevention of secondary transmission and international spread and contributing to the international response though multi-sectoral communication and collaboration and active participation in increasing knowledge on the virus and the disease, as well as advancing research. Countries should also follow travel advice from WHO.

To the global community: As this is a new coronavirus, and it has been previously shown that similar coronaviruses required substantial efforts for regular information sharing and research, the global community should continue to demonstrate solidarity and cooperation, in compliance with Article 44 of the IHR (2005), in supporting each other on the identification of the source of this new virus, its full potential for human-to-human transmission, preparedness for potential importation of cases, and research for developing necessary treatment.

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two local dailies in Iloilo)