It Figures: What the Numbers Say This Week

13 – number of enzymes (a collection from plants, rabbits, bacteria and yeast) that together can easily extracted usable hydrogen fuel from starch.

0 – number of menstrual periods a woman can expect to have while on the recently FDA approved continuous contraception. She can also expect to conceive 0 babies.

10- number of sharks that NOAA scientists want to kill in the Galapagos Island to ensure the safety of globally endangered monk seals. Rob Stewart would not be pleased. And like my grandmother said: two wrongs do not make a right.

67 – inches of rain that annually fall on Mobile, Alabama, the wettest city in the US.

590 – Number of active and retired research chimpanzees under the care of the NIH’s National Center for Research Resources, which has just permanently given up its chimp breeding program.

1.3 – percent fall in US carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning in 2006
. Expensive fuel prices were cited as one reason. 4$-a-gallon gas here we come.

9 – uppermost weight in pounds of the African pouch rat that has invaded the Florida Keys after an exotic pet breeder allowed her band of rodents to escape.

12,900 – years ago that a comet crashed into North America, killing loads of mammals and maybe even a human society.

70 - percent of cervical cancer caused by Human Papilloma Virus (HPV).

4 - strains of HPV for which Gardasil provides immunity (types 16, 18, 11, and 6).

7.67 - The amount in Australian dollars by which the share price of pharmacological giant CSL, which distributes Gardasil in Australia, dropped last Friday. This shaved $1.4 billion off the CSL’s total worth.

5 - the number of Melbourne schoolgirls whose bad reactions to Gardasil triggered panic throughout Australia, which some speculate triggered the drop in CSL share price.

5 million - the number of doses of Gardasil doled out so far in the United States.

1,637 - the number of women from those 5 million shots who have suffered “adverse-events” from the vaccine.

138 - the number of those “adverse-events” deemed serious by the FDA.

15 - years that immunologist Ian Hector Frazer from University of Queensland’s Diamantina Institute for Cancer, Immunology and Metabolic Medicine in Australia spent developing the Gardasil vaccine which protects against four strains of HPV.