Upstream CAPEX Reductions -- March 11, 2016

From Woods Mckenzie:

I think two interesting data points is the extent to which California Resources will quit drilling in California, and the fact that Whiting is not on the list (if it is, I missed it).

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Here We Go Again!

WKOW/Madison is reporting:

The Wisconsin Department of Health Services is reporting four more cases of Elizabethkingia in the Madison-Milwaukee area.

Wisconsin State Hygiene Communicable Disease Deputy Director David Warshauer says 48 cases is worrisome.

"Laboratories may see a case a year, so it is concerning,"  Dr. Warshauer said about the rare blood infection being found in 12 counties.  D.H.S does say they have revised the numbers of deaths from 18 to 15 possibly linked to the bacteria.

Right now, researchers in his lab are isolating Elizabethkingia DNA samples.  Just one of isolation can take up to 48 hours.  His lab has done more than 40 in the last few weeks.

"Everybody has been busy, hoping to find the source for this."

But CDC Spokesman Tom Skinner says there is no smoking gun just yet.

 "We're now including any possible food source here that maybe implemented here, including any soil water or medical products that anyone who may have acquired this infection may have been using," Skinner said.

Hopefully, Chipotle is not part of this story.

Regarding the bacterium:

Elizabethkingia meningoseptica is a gram-negative rod-shaped bacterium widely distributed in nature (e.g. fresh water, salt water, or soil). It may be normally present in fish and frogs but is not normally present in human microflora.

In 1959 American bacteriologist Elizabeth O. King (who isolated Kingella in 1960), was studying unclassified bacteria associated with pediatric meningitis at the CDC in Atlanta, when she isolated an organism that she named Flavobacterium meningosepticum (Flavobacterium means "the yellow bacillus" in Latin; meningosepticum likewise means "associated with meningitis and sepsis"). 

In 2005, a 16S rRNA phylogenetic tree of Chryseobacteria showed that C. meningosepticum along with C. miricola (which was reported to have been isolated from Russian space station Mir in 2001 and placed in the genus Chryseobacterium in 2003 were close to each other but outside the tree of the rest of the Chryseobacteria and were then placed in a new genus Elizabethkingia named after the original discoverer of F. meningosepticum.