The destruction appeared greatest in Derna, a city formerly held by Islamic extremists in the chaos that has gripped Libya for more than a decade, leaving it with crumbling and inadequate infrastructure. Libya remains divided between two rival administrations, one in the east and one in the west, each backed by militias and foreign governments.

The confirmed death toll from the weekend flooding stood at 61 as of late Monday, according to health authorities. But the tally did not include Derna, which had become inaccessible, and many of the thousands missing were believed carried away by waters.

Video by residents of the city posted online showed major devastation. Entire residential areas were erased along a river that runs down from the mountains through the city center. Multistory apartment buildings that once stood well back from the river were partially collapsed into the mud.

In a phone interview with Al Masar television station Monday, Prime Minister Ossama Hamad of the east Libyan government said that 2,000 were feared dead in Derna, and thousands were believed missing. He said Derna has been declared a disaster zone.

Ahmed Mosmari, a spokesman for the country's armed forces based in the east, said during a news conference that the death toll in Derna had surpassed 2,000. He said there were between 5,000 and 6,000 reported missing. Mosmari attributed the catastrophe to the collapse of two nearby dams, causing a lethal flash flood.

Since a 2011 uprising that toppled and later killed longtime ruler Moammar Kadafi, Libya has lacked a central government and the resulting lawlessness has meant dwindling investment in the country's roads and public services and also minimal regulation of private building.

Derna, along with the city of Surt, was controlled by extremist groups for years, at one point by those who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group, until forces loyal to the east-based government expelled them in 2018.

At least 46 people were reported dead in the eastern town of Bayda, said Abdel-Rahim Mazek, head of the town’s main medical center. An additional seven people were reported dead in the coastal town of Susa in northeastern Libya, according to the Ambulance and Emergency Authority. Seven others were reported dead in the towns of Shahatt and Omar al Mokhtar, said Ossama Abduljaleel, the health minister. One person was reported dead Sunday in the town of Marj.

The Libyan Red Crescent said three of its workers had died while helping families in Derna. Earlier, the group said it lost contact with one of its workers as he attempted to help a stuck family in Bayda. Dozens of others were reported missing, and authorities fear they could have died in the floods that destroyed homes and other properties in several towns in eastern Libya, according to local reports.

In Derna, media said the situation was catastrophic with no electricity or communications.

Essam Abu Zeriba, the interior minister of the east Libya government, said more than 5,000 people were expected to be missing in Derna. He said many of the victims were swept toward the Mediterranean.

“The situation is tragic,” he declared in a telephone interview on the Saudi-owned satellite news channel Al Arabiya. He urged local and international agencies to rush to help the city.

Georgette Gagnon, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Libya, said early reports showed that dozens of villages and towns were “severely affected ... with widespread flooding, damage to infrastructure, and loss of life.”

“I am deeply saddened by the severe impact of [storm] Daniel on the country. ... I call on all local, national, and international partners to join hands to provide urgent humanitarian assistance to the people in eastern Libya,” she wrote on X platform, formerly known as Twitter.

In a post on X, the U.S. Embassy in Libya said it was in contact with both the U.N. and Libyan authorities and was determining how to deliver aid to the most affected areas.

Over the weekend, Libyans shared video on social media showing flooded houses and roads in many areas across eastern Libya. They pleaded for help as floods trapped people inside their homes and in their vehicles.

Ossama Hamad, the prime minister of the east Libya government, declared Derna a disaster zone after heavy rainfall and floods destroyed much of the city, which is in the delta of the small Wadi Derna, a ravine on Libya’s east coast. The prime minister also announced three days of mourning and ordered flags across the country to be lowered to half-staff.

Controlling eastern and western Libya, Cmdr. Khalifa Hifter deployed troops to help residents in Benghazi and other eastern towns. Ahmed Mosmari, a spokesperson for Hifter’s forces, said they lost contact with five troops who were helping besieged families in Bayda.

Foreign governments sent messages of support on Monday evening. Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the president of the United Arab Emirates, said his country would send humanitarian assistance and search-and-rescue teams to eastern Libya, according to the UAE’s state-run WAM news agency.

Turkey, which supports the country's Tripoli-based government in the west, also expressed condolences, along with neighboring Algeria and Egypt, and also Iraq.

Storm Daniel is expected to arrive in parts of west Egypt on Monday, and the country’s meteorological authorities warned about possible rain and bad weather.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

Source

Also:  Libya: 10,000 missing after unprecedented floods, says Red Cross.

Latest:  More Than 5,000 Dead in Libya as Collapsed Dams Worsen Flood Disaster

Source

Source

An 80-plus-degree day is not sizzling by Phoenix standards. Even in Boston, it wasn't high enough to trigger an official heat warning for the wider public.

But research has shown that those temperatures, coming so early in June, would likely drive up the number of heat-related hospital visits and deaths across the Boston region.

The targeted email alert the doctors and nurses at Cambridge Health Alliance in Somerville, Massachusetts, got that day is part of a pilot project run by the nonprofit Climate Central and Harvard University's Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment, known as C-CHANGE.

Medical clinicians based at 12 community-based clinics in seven states—California, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin—are receiving these alerts.

At each location, the first email alert of the season was triggered when local temperatures reached the 90th percentile for that community. In a suburb of Portland, Oregon, that happened on May 14 during a springtime heat wave. In Houston, that occurred in early June.

A second email alert went out when forecasts indicated the thermometer would reach the 95th percentile. For Cambridge Health Alliance primary care physician Rebecca Rogers, that second alert arrived on July 6, when the high hit 87 degrees.

The emails remind Rogers and other clinicians to focus on patients who are particularly vulnerable to heat. That includes outdoor workers, older adults, or patients with heart disease, diabetes, or kidney disease.

Other at-risk groups include youth athletes and people who can't afford air conditioning, or who don't have stable housing. Heat has been linked to complications during a pregnancy as well.

"Heat can be dangerous to all of us," said Caleb Dresser, director of health care solutions at C-CHANGE. "But the impacts are incredibly uneven based on who you are, where you live, and what type of resources you have."

The pilot program aims to remind clinicians to start talking to patients about how to protect themselves on dangerously hot days, which are happening more frequently because of climate change. Heat is already the leading cause of death in the U.S. from weather-related hazards, Dresser said. Letting clinicians know when temperatures pose a particular threat to their patients could save lives.

"What we're trying to say is, 'You really need to go into heat mode now,'" said Andrew Pershing, vice president for science at Climate Central, with a recognition that "it's going to be more dangerous for folks in your community who are more stressed."

"This is not your grandmother's heat," said Ashley Ward, who directs the Heat Policy Innovation Hub at Duke University. "The heat regime that we are seeing now is not what we experienced 10 or 20 years ago. So we have to accept that our environment has changed. This might very well be the coolest summer for the rest of our lives."

The alerts bumped heat to the forefront of Rogers' conversations with patients. She made time to ask each person whether they can cool off at home and at work.

That's how she learned that one of her patients, Luciano Gomes, works in construction.

"If you were getting too hot at work and maybe starting to feel sick, do you know some things to look out for?" Rogers asked Gomes.

"No," said Gomes slowly, shaking his head.

Rogers told Gomes about early signs of heat exhaustion: dizziness, weakness, or profuse sweating. She handed Gomes tip sheets she'd printed out after receiving them along with the email alerts.

They included information about how to avoid heat exhaustion and dehydration, as well as specific guidance for patients with asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), dementia, diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and mental health concerns.

Rogers pointed out a color chart that ranges from pale yellow to dark gold. It's a sort of hydration barometer, based on the color of one's urine.

"So if your pee is dark like this during the day when you're at work," she told Gomes, "it probably means you need to drink more water."

Gomes nodded. "This is more than you were expecting to talk about when you came to the doctor today, I think," she said with a laugh.

During this visit, an interpreter translated the visit and information into Portuguese for Gomes, who is from Brazil and quite familiar with heat. But he now had questions for Rogers about the best ways to stay hydrated.

"Because here I've been addicted to soda," Gomes told Rogers through the interpreter. "I'm trying to watch out for that and change to sparkling water. But I don't have much knowledge on how much I can take of it."

"As long as it doesn't have sugar, it's totally good," Rogers said.

Now Rogers creates heat mitigation plans with each of her high-risk patients. But she still has medical questions that the research doesn't yet address. For example: If patients take medications that make them urinate more often, could that lead to dehydration when it's hot? Should she reduce their doses during the warmest weeks or months? And, if so, by how much? Research has yielded no firm answers to those questions.

Deidre Alessio, a nurse practitioner at Cambridge Health Alliance, also has received the email alerts. She has patients who sleep on the streets or in tents and search for places to cool off during the day.

"Getting these alerts makes me realize that I need to do more homework on the cities and towns where my patients live," she said, "and help them find transportation to a cooling center."

Most clinics and hospitals don't have heat alerts built into electronic medical records, don't filter patients based on heat vulnerability, and don't have systems in place to send heat warnings to some or all of their patients.

"I would love to see health care institutions get the resources to staff the appropriate outreach," said Gaurab Basu, a Cambridge Health Alliance physician who co-directs the Center for Health Equity Advocacy and Education at Cambridge Health Alliance. "But hospital systems are still really strained by COVID and staffing issues."

This pilot program is an excellent start and could benefit by including pharmacists, said Kristie Ebi, founding director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington.

Ebi has studied heat early-warning systems for 25 years. She says one problem is that too many people don't take heat warnings seriously. In a survey of Americans who experienced heat waves in four cities, only about half of residents took precautions to avoid harm to their health.

"We need more behavioral health research," she said, "to really understand how to motivate people who don't perceive themselves to be at risk, to take action."

For Ebi and other researchers, the call to action is not just to protect individual health, but to address the root cause of rising temperatures: climate change.

"We'll be dealing with increased exposure to heat for the rest of our lives," said Dresser. "To address the factors that put people at risk during heat waves, we have to move away from fossil fuels so that climate change doesn't get as bad as it could."

2023 KFF Health News.
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Source

Standing on the marina, Rob Skelly peers into the darkness of the river where bright speckles of algae drift in the water. A neon green invader. “It’s starting to build,” he says. “Tomorrow, you’ll find that there’s clumps like that all over the river—and then the day after that there’ll be more and more.”

Until this summer, Skelly had never seen algae wax and wane like this in the River Bann, a major waterway in Northern Ireland. The owner of the Cranagh Activity Centre set up his thriving water sports business 27 years ago, and it has been in this location since 2015. The algae has killed it. Following news reports of toxin-producing blue-green algae in lakes and rivers around Northern Ireland, people began canceling their bookings for water-skiing lessons and similar activities in droves.

Skelly doesn’t blame them. “How can I put customers into that?” he says, looking at the mottled water below us. The season ruined, Skelly has decided to close his business for good. “You know, it’s heartbreaking.”

Blue-green algae is coming to a river or lake near you, almost without doubt. The scourge of toxic blooms is becoming increasingly problematic worldwide, in part due to the climate crisis. Despite the name, blue-green algae aren’t actually algae, but a group of photosynthesizing bacteria called cyanobacteria. Under the right conditions, they can suddenly proliferate across huge expanses of water, leaving characteristic grayish-blue marks at the edges of lakes or rivers. Often, a highly unpleasant, rich, drain-like smell pervades in affected areas.

These microbes sometimes produce huge quantities of toxins—cyanotoxins—which can cause diarrhea, vomiting, breathing difficulties, and occasionally even death in humans. Outbreaks have been associated with pet and livestock fatalities. People in the United States living near lakes where cyanobacteria regularly bloom have a higher risk of liver cancer, and some research suggests that cyanotoxins might even cause motor neurone disease, though further investigations are warranted to prove that particular connection. Research suggests that cyanotoxins can likely be aerosolized and breathed in when water is kicked up during recreational activities or fishing.

Genetic analysis hints that cyanobacteria have been around for roughly 3 billion years. While the dumping of sewage and nutrient runoff from farms have long been known to swell the bacteria’s ranks in bodies of water, the cyanobacteria seem to be really flourishing now as global temperatures and atmospheric levels of CO2 rise.

“That, I think, is the really compelling evidence for the link to climate change—we’re seeing these increases in places where there hasn’t been a really substantial increase in urbanization or fertilizer application,” says Hans Paerl at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s Institute of Marine Sciences. “It is a global problem.”

Cyanobacteria are proving to be a menace practically everywhere—from Florida to Africa and China, to name a few examples. In China’s Lake Taihu, the blooms are so bad that authorities have battled for years to physically remove the sludge with special machines that chew it up using hundreds of tiny teeth.

This year in Northern Ireland, some of the most serious blooms have occurred in Lough Neagh, the largest body of fresh water by surface area in the UK and Ireland. Some locals have described algal blooms on the lough as the worst they have seen in their lifetimes, and there have been reports of multiple dog deaths possibly caused by cyanotoxins. From Lough Neagh, water flows into the River Bann and heads north toward the town of Coleraine, where Rob Skelly’s water sports business was located until recently. Finally, the Bann enters the sea on the north coast of Northern Ireland. Warnings about blue-green algae were put up on beaches there earlier this summer.

WIRED showed Paerl pictures of a blueish residue above the waterline at a jetty very near to Lough Neagh. “It’s an indication of very high amounts of material,” he says.

Around 40 percent of all Northern Ireland’s drinking water is sourced from Lough Neagh. NI Water, the public body responsible for drinking water, says it uses methods known to remove cyanotoxins. Chlorination alone is not enough, notes Paerl. In 2007, a blue-green algal bloom at Lake Taihu in China was so severe that 2 million people were forced to go without drinking water for at least a week.

A spokeswoman for NI Water says that drinking water is treated using granular activated carbon, a kind of filtration that removes certain chemicals, including cyanotoxins. Tests for one particular cyanotoxin, microcystin-LR, in drinking water post-treatment have consistently shown extremely low levels throughout 2023, well below World Health Organization guidelines, she adds.

However, NI Water does not test for cyanotoxins in the source water. “To the best of my knowledge, no one has yet tested for toxins either in water or fish,” says Matt Service at Northern Ireland’s Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute. Some local scientists are concerned that our understanding of how abundant these toxins are in places like Lough Neagh remains very murky.

“I was interested in whether I could get some funding to specifically study the toxicology of the blue-green algae,” says Neil Reid, a senior lecturer in conservation biology at Queen’s University Belfast. He has collected multiple samples of surface water but hasn’t yet been able to secure the funding needed to conduct research on them.

Reid points out that quite a lot of the visible sludge could be a harmless species of algae and not the dreaded cyanobacteria. It would help local people understand the risk when fishing on the lough, for example, if they knew more about its toxicity, he suggests. But, for now, the samples will remain frozen in a laboratory freezer.

Besides nutrients entering lakes and rivers, which can spur the proliferation of algae and cyanobacteria, there are other factors that can trigger major blooms. Northern Ireland just had its wettest July on record—potentially accelerating the runoff of nutrients into bodies of water including Lough Neagh, says Reid. The lough is also 1 degree Celsius warmer today than it was just 30 years ago. That could benefit cyanobacteria over competing species, including algae, says Don Anderson, a senior scientist in the biology department at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

“When it gets too hot, other species don’t grow, or grow slowly,” he explains. “Cyanobacteria are extraordinarily flexible in terms of their tolerance.”

Then there’s the zebra mussels. These invasive mollusks have been resident in Lough Neagh since at least 2005. Here, as in other lakes in Europe and the United States, they appear to have consumed large quantities of algae, clarifying the water in the process. That might sound good, but the problem, Reid explains, is that this then allows more light into the lake, potentially giving the cyanobacteria a chance to thrive while their competitors get gobbled up by the mussels.

“I think it’s a very reasonable hypothesis,” says Robin Rohwer at the University of Texas at Austin, who has studied the prevalence of cyanotoxins in Lake Mendota in Wisconsin. Data collected across two decades suggests that, following zebra mussel invasion, the “toxic season” on the lake during the summer lengthened dramatically—lasting more than 50 days longer, on average. There are plenty of mysteries, though. Rohwer says she didn’t detect a boom in the cyanobacteria itself, just an increase in the volume of toxins present in the lake. What’s driving that remains unclear.

Rohwer adds that, as someone who enjoys sailing on the lake herself, she avoids boating whenever algae buildup is visible. In unpublished results, she says she has found that toxin levels out in the middle of the lake aren’t usually a serious concern—though she has detected “extremely toxic” scum washed up at the shoreline.

There’s little that humans can do to stymie blue-green algal blooms, says Paerl. And Rohwer notes that it is practically impossible to eradicate zebra mussels once they have become established. The only tactic available, really, is reducing nutrient runoff into lakes and rivers, for example by lowering fertilizer use on farms and building buffer zones or artificial wetlands around the edges of large bodies of water to try to soak up the nutrients. Paerl says such efforts have been reasonably successful in North Carolina, for example.

For Rob Skelly, the damage, sadly, is already done. He says he has spent recent months chasing public bodies over the cyanobacteria problem. “Nobody will take responsibility,” he alleges, adding that the sudden closure of his business feels like the end of an era. Many former customers have been in touch, he says, to express their regret at what has happened.

“I have loved every day of my working life because I’ve had the river. It’s just been part of my DNA,” adds Skelly. “I never thought it would be the river that would come back and bite me.”

Source

Broad-spectrum antibiotics, for example, attack any kind of bacteria that it comes across, including those that are good for your gut microbiome. With the destruction of “good” bacteria, the remaining disease-causing bacteria have more access to nutrients which help them grow.

One broad-spectrum antibiotic that’s only used as a last resort in treatment are carbapenems. It does a good job of wiping out bacteria, but this includes the “good” and “bad” ones. Repeated use of the drug spurred a class of carbapenem-resistant bacteria, called Enterobacteriaceae.

To study how these resistant bacteria grow and thrive after antibiotic use, the authors tested samples of human feces along with experiments in mice and lab tests on carbapenem-resistant bacteria.

Like any living thing, bacteria need nutrients to stay alive. The experiments showed that when antibiotics annihilated the “good” bacteria, there was less competition for food in the gut. In other words, the remaining disease-causing germs helped themselves to a banquet of nutrients.

Destroying the beneficial bacteria also reduced the amount of waste products they made. Known as metabolites, some created from “good” bacteria are programmed to stop the spread of ‘bad’ germs.

“Understanding how antibiotics cause carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae to grow in the intestine means that we can develop new treatments to restrict their growth in the intestine, which will lead to a reduction in these antibiotic-resistant infections,” says Alexander Yip, a professor in the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London and first author of the study, in a university release.

By identifying the surplus of nutrients for disease-causing bacteria to devour, the researchers are now looking for ways to stop this access. First, they will need to find “good” bacteria that can outcompete pathogenic bacteria for nutrients and create metabolites that stop pathogenic bacterial growth.

The goal is to create gut-tailored treatments called microbiome therapeutics.

“When a patient is taking antibiotics we could give them inhibitory metabolites to restrict the growth of resistant bacteria. After a patient has stopped taking antibiotics we could give them a mixture of beneficial gut bacteria to help their gut microbiome recover, restore depletion of nutrients, and restore production of inhibitory metabolites,” explains Julie McDonald, a professor at the Center for Bacterial Resistance Biology at Imperial College London.

The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Source

The Food and Drug Administration in the coming days is expected to authorize the updated vaccines that target the XBB.1.5 subvariant of Omicron, and early data provide encouraging signs for the new shots, CDC said. The public health agency added that the new BA.2.86 lineage of coronavirus was not driving the current increases in COVID cases and hospitalizations in the United States, but rather attributed it to other predominantly circulating viruses.

Since CDC's initial risk assessment last month, BA.2.86 has been identified in nine U.S. states as of Friday. The Omicron offshoot has also been identified from both human and wastewater specimens in countries including Japan, UK and Canada.

This is in contrast to CDC's comments in August that the new variant may be more capable than older variants in causing infection in people who have previously had COVID-19 or who have received vaccines.

Source

Antarctica is often described as one of the most pristine places in the world, but it has a dirty secret. Parts of the sea floor near Australia’s Casey research station are as polluted as the harbour in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, according to a study published in PLOS One in August.

The contamination is likely to be widespread across Antarctica’s older research stations, says study co-author Jonathan Stark, a marine ecologist at the Australian Antarctic Division in Hobart. “These contaminants accumulate over long time frames and don’t just go away,” he says.

Stark and his colleagues found high concentrations of hydrocarbons — compounds found in fuels — and heavy metals, such as lead, copper and zinc. Many of the samples were also loaded with polychlorinated biphenyls, highly carcinogenic chemical compounds that were common before their international ban in 2001.

When the researchers compared some of the samples with data from the World Harbour Project — an international collaboration that tracks large urban waterways — they found that lead, copper and zinc levels in some cases were similar to those seen in parts of Sydney Harbour and Rio de Janeiro over the past two decades.

WIDESPREAD POLLUTION

The problem of pollution is not unique to Casey station, says Ceisha Poirot, manager of policy, environment and safety at Antarctica New Zealand in Christchurch. “All national programmes are dealing with this issue,” she says. At New Zealand’s Scott Base — which is being redeveloped — contamination left from past fuel spills and poor waste management has been detected in soil and marine sediments. More of this historical pollution will emerge as the climate warms, says Poirot. “Things that were once frozen in the soil are now becoming more mobile,” she says.

Most of Antarctica’s contamination is due to historically poor waste management. In the old days, waste was often just dumped a small distance from research stations, says Terence Palmer, a marine scientist at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi.

Research stations started to get serious about cleaning up their act in 1991. In that year, an international agreement known as the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, or the Madrid Protocol, was adopted. This designated Antarctica as a “natural reserve, devoted to peace and science” and directed nations to monitor environmental impacts related to their activities. But much of the damage had already been done — roughly two-thirds of Antarctic research stations were built before 1991.

And although historical pollution is a problem, future pollution remains a concern as the icy continent becomes more crowded. There are already more than 100 research stations or national facilities, and most of the buildings are located in ice-free areas, where they jostle with wildlife for a foothold on the most viable land. Ice-free areas make up less than 1% of Antarctica, but they support the highest diversity of plants and animals, including penguin and seal colonies.

A 2019 study found that more than half of all ice-free areas on the coastline have ground disturbance that’s visible from space. “The stations have quite a large footprint for the number of people that are there,” says Shaun Brooks, a conservation scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Hobart who co-authored the study.

Each nation is responsible for its own environmental monitoring around research stations, and practices vary, says Brooks. He and his colleagues have proposed a solution in a preprint posted on the Social Science Research Network last month. They outline a nine-step process to help station managers set objectives for reducing the impact of their facilities on nearby ecosystems.

Other researchers are working on ways to reverse the damage of past practices. Lucas Martínez Álvarez, who specializes in bioremediation at the Argentine Antarctic Institute in Buenos Aires, and his colleagues are using bacteria to remove hydrocarbons from soil around Argentina’s Carlini Base on King George Island. In 2020, Martínez Álvarez and his team reported that they were able to remove more than 75% of hydrocarbons from fuel-contaminated soil. The approach could reduce the need to ship tonnes of contaminated soil out of Antarctica, says Martínez Álvarez.

Stark says that the Australian Antarctic Division has already begun upgrading wastewater treatment facilities at its Casey and Davis stations. The next step for Stark and his colleagues is to assess whether historical pollution continues to affect Antarctic ecosystems today. Stark’s earlier studies have shown that polluted areas in Antarctica are less biodiverse than control locations, with some resilient species becoming more dominant. “It will be interesting to see if these effects have persisted — or gotten worse — or if communities have adapted in any way,” says Stark.

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on September 1, 2023.

Source

He highlighted that the homegrown treatment method is in the third phase of its clinical trials.

Elsewhere in his remarks, Shahverdi noted that at least 10 Iranian knowledge-based companies are currently cooperating with Royan Research Institute.

He stated that one of the firms is working in the field of umbilical cord blood, which is now known to contain hematopoietic stem cells that have potential life-saving benefit. 

It has developed a treatment for people with blemishes and freckles, Shahverdi said, noting that the method has been approved by the Food and Drug Administration of the Islamic Republic of Iran, affiliated with the Ministry of Health and Medical Education.

He said Royan Institute is also developing treatments for people with central nervous system problems, bone diseases and diabetes.

Shahverdi also said his center has been conducting research into immunotherapy for the treatment of pediatric brain tumors, and the work has just entered its second clinical stage.

MNA/PR

Source

Employees in IBM's software division have become the latest tech workers to face a return-to-office mandate, in this case requiring them to be in the office for a minimum of three days a week, starting from today.

Unlike other return to office mandates that have been put in place by Amazon, Google, Meta, and Zoom in recent months, IBM’s requirement will affect employees across the globe, rather than just workers who are based in the US.

"Starting next week, all IBM Software employees will be required to spend at least 3 days in the office each week. The decision on which days will be left to managers and individual project teams," read an internal blog written by IBM Software's Kareem Yusuf, senior vice president for product management, and Dinesh Nirmal, senior vice president for products. The blog post was published on September 5, with its content first reported by The Register.

According to the blog post, the mandate will initially just apply to employees living within 50 miles of an IBM office, with those that live further out being "exempt at this time.”

IBM has yet to respond to questions about when employees living further than 50 miles will be required to be back in the office, if other IBM divisions will be rolling out similar mandates, and whether a failure to meet the new attendance requirements will result in disciplinary action or termination, as other companies have stated office it will.

"It is vital to our culture and our shared goals — tripling development output, building winning products, and winning new clients — that we spend more meaningful time together, in-person,” the blog reportedly read, noting that right now, one  in four  IBM Software employees are working in the office three days a week, a figure the division wants to reach to three  in four by October.

IBM plans to replace jobs with AI

In May, IBM’s CEO Arvind Krishna conducted an interview with Bloomberg during which he said the company plans to use AI to replace almost 8,000 jobs, adding that the company was also looking to cut down hiring for roles that could be replaced with AI.

It was estimated this would amount to around 26,000 roles, which include non-customer facing jobs and back-office functions such as HR, Krishnasaid, adding that 30% of such roles, or approximately 7,800 jobs, could be replaced with AI or automation over the next five years.

Krishna’s comments on AI replacing humans come just months after the company said it would cut 3,900 jobs or 1.5% of its workforce. 

Source

As the world warms beyond 1.5°C, large parts of the world will start to have heatwaves so extreme that healthy young people could die within several hours if they fail to find respite, a study has warned. This could result in mass deaths in places where people and buildings aren’t adapted to extreme heat and air conditioning is rare, says Carter Powis at the University of Oxford.

“You could have a very extreme heatwave that departs from historical norms substantially, crosses this threshold and causes much more mortality than you would otherwise expect,” he says. “What we [will] see, particularly in Europe and North America, is an enormous increase in the incidence of these heatwaves [as the world warms] between 1.5 and 2 degrees [C].”

Global warming is already sparking more intense and more frequent heatwaves, so is causing large numbers of fatalities. It is estimated that there were 62,000 heat-related deaths across Europe in the summer of 2022, for instance. However, the vast majority of these were people aged over 65 who may have had existing health issues.

Could global warming result in parts of the world getting so hot that even healthy young people die? Matthew Huber at Purdue University, Indiana, and his colleagues set out to investigate this question in 2010.

Based on theory, they decided the limit of survivability is when the temperature measured by a thermometer covered in a wet cloth exceeds 35°C (95°F). This is the so-called wet-bulb temperature. It reflects the fact that humidity affects our ability to stay cool by sweating. At this wet-bulb reading we can no longer keep core body temperature in check naturally and it will rise to deadly levels if we don’t take action to stay cool in other ways.

At present, the wet bulb temperature very seldom exceeds 31°C (88°F) anywhere on Earth’s surface. Huber’s team concluded that large areas would only start to exceed the 35°C wet bulb limit if the world warmed by more than 7°C – which is thought highly unlikely.

However, recent studies suggest parts of the tropics could exceed this limit at lower levels of warming. What’s more, in practice most people couldn’t survive anything close to a wet-bulb temperature of 35°C. “The original 35-degree limit was meant always as an upper limit,” says Huber.

Last year, Daniel Vecellio at Pennsylvania State University and his colleagues tested 24 healthy young women and men to see how hot and humid it could get before their bodies were unable to stop their core temperature rising – the point at which heat is “noncompensable”. Continued exposure to these conditions for several hours can result in death.

The findings suggest the survivability limit is closer to a 31°C wet-bulb reading, though other factors will affect this in reality. Because the volunteers weren’t acclimatised to heat and were doing everyday tasks during the tests, this should be seen as a lower limit with a 35°C wet-bulb temperature being the upper limit, says Powis.

“Anything between those two is very much in the danger zone,” he says. “There’s not just one threshold that is relevant to everyone. Different populations have different thresholds where there could suddenly be dramatic mortality outcomes.”

Powis and his colleagues have now used data from weather stations and climate models to see where in the world such conditions may currently occur based on Vecellio’s 31°C wet-bulb findings, and how this will change at the world warms.

For instance, with 1°C of global warming – a level already passed – only 3 per cent of weather stations in Europe are likely to pass Vecellio’s threshold more than once in 100 years. With 2°C of warming, 25 per cent are likely to. In the US, 20 per cent of stations are likely to pass the threshold more than once in 100 years with 1°C global warming, rising to 28 per cent for 2°C.

“Sometimes these human survivability limits are useful to understand the problem, but the reality is that we see a significant health burden on the population even at ‘moderate’ temperatures,” says Dann Mitchell at the University of Bristol, UK, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Using a threshold-based temperature can be misleading, because even if it’s hot outside, it doesn’t mean that it’s hot inside.”

“I would like to highlight that all heat-related impacts on human health and well-being are preventable,” says Raquel Nunes at the University of Warwick in the UK. But with heatwaves becoming more frequent, more intense and more prolonged, urgent action is needed to prevent more heat-related deaths, she says.

Journal reference:   Science Advances DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adg9297

Source

COPD affects the lungs and progresses, resulting in frequent hospitalization, burdening patients, families and health care systems. It has been viewed as a condition usually associated with male smokers.

"With increasing pressure on Canada's health systems, it is crucial to identify gaps in care that lead to higher utilization," said Dr. Kate Johnson, assistant professor, Faculty of Medicine and Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of British Columbia (UBC). "Hospital admissions for COPD may represent one such area for improvement as, in many instances, they could be avoided with proper preventive or early therapeutic interventions."

The researchers from UBC, Providence Health Care Research Institute and St. Paul's Hospital, Vancouver, BC, looked at national data on hospital admissions in Canada to understand trends in admissions for COPD. They identified 1,134,359 admissions for COPD in patients aged 40 years and older between 2002 and 2017.

Of the total admissions, 240,611 (21.2%) were for younger adults aged 40–64 years and more than half of admissions (127,514, 53.0%) in this age group were for females. Over the 16-year study period, the number of annual hospital admissions for COPD increased by 68.8%, from 52,937 to 89,384.

After adjusting for population growth, age and sex, the hospital admission rate for COPD increased almost 10% (from 437 to 479 per 100,000 people), even though admission rates for other health concerns decreased over the same period. The increase was most pronounced among younger females (12.2%), followed by younger males (24.4%) and older females (29.8%), while admissions among older males declined (9.0%).

"The number of hospital admissions for COPD has rapidly increased since 2010 in Canada. Even after adjusting for population growth and aging, COPD admission rates have risen since 2010 in all groups except among older males. This is in contrast to declining all-cause admission rates over this period. Our findings call into question whether progress is being made in improving COPD care and outcomes," conclude the authors.

The authors suggest that a number of factors could be driving the increase, including better treatments that are extending the lifespans of patients with COPD, changes in the rates of pneumonia and influenza, and changes to hospital admissions practices. Environmental factors, such as changes in exposure to air pollution, wildfire smoke or indoor toxic inhalants, may also be contributing to the increase.

To help hospitals and policy-makers understand the rates of COPD admissions, the researchers created a Web app.

A related commentary https://www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.230998 emphasizes that the research paper's findings should sound alarm bells for health systems.

"As the prevalence of COPD in Canada's populations rises, so too will the burden on hospitals if a radical change in COPD care is not implemented," write Drs. Alina Blazer and Matthew Stanbrook, respirologists at the University of Toronto.

"Solutions will require novel and multifactorial approaches to examining emerging risk factors for COPD, addressing disparities in gender and socioeconomic status, facilitating access to specialist care and investing resources in prevention and rehabilitation. Without sustained and coordinated action, health systems will continue to fail patients with COPD in Canada."

Source

Even at the equator, where the land thrusts high enough, ice has stayed in place, defying the intense tropical sun. Yet decades of man-made climate change mean that thousands of glaciers across the globe now face extinction.

“There is a lag [between warming and melting], so even if from tomorrow there were no more CO2 emissions worldwide, even then glaciers in the Alps would lose about 50 per cent of their mass,” explains Dr Matthias Huss. “They’re too big for the present climate.”

Dr Huss is a glaciologist from ETH Zurich, one of Switzerland’s top universities and leads the country’s glacier monitoring body Glamos. From his vantage point at the heart of the Alps, he is witnessing the rapid deterioration of Europe’s glaciers at first-hand.

Last year was a record for ice loss in Switzerland, with a lack of snowfall in winter to provide insulation for the ice and repeated heatwaves in the summer causing Swiss glaciers to lose six per cent of their mass or around three cubic kilometres of ice.

That figure smashed the previous record for glacier melt from 2003. Until last year, a two per cent loss would have been considered extreme.

This year, says Dr Hauss, hasn’t been much better “This has all happened again, after a record year in 2022. The zero-degree line rose to more than 5000 meters, which is the highest ever that has been observed,” he said, referring to the altitude at which the temperature hits freezing.

Glaciologist at ETHZ and head of the Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland (GLAMOS) Matthias Huss (Photo: Denis Balibouse/Reuters)

The consequence is that smaller glaciers, which lack the mass to survive, are already doomed. Crucially, ice lost now is unlikely to be recovered, meaning that each year of dramatic melting simply accelerates the Alps towards a future with little or no ice.

“In the short, medium-term future nothing can be changed, but we have the option to change the long-term future. In the scenario with no CO2 reduction, all ice would disappear by the end of the century.

“But if we implement the Paris agreement we could save around a third of the ice in the Alps.”

Since 1850, the last peak in ice mass, the Alps have lost two-thirds of their ice already. What might remain will therefore, in the best case, be just a third of a third – little more than 10 per cent of their 19th century glacial boom.

There have, points out Dr Claus-Dieter Hillenbrand at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), always been fluctuations in climate that can cause glaciers to shrink. Two factors make this period different, however. One, climate change is making the extremes even more extreme. And two, the background temperature levels are that much higher that glaciers cannot recover in the periods between extremes.

According to Dr Huss, average temperatures would need to fall by two to three degrees Celsius for glaciers to start regaining mass. Given that best-case scenarios involve keeping warming at 1.5°C, that won’t happen in our lifetimes.

Such is the increase in temperatures that the so-called equilibrium line altitude, at which ice mass is neither shrinks nor grows, has shifted uphill by around 200 metres in the past few decades to around 3,000m. By 2100 it could be 4,000m. Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps is 4,808m.

For a glimpse of the future, says Dr Huss, Europeans need only look to the Pyrenees, which top out at 3,404 metres. “They used to be glaciarised… but nowadays the region is almost ice free. What’s left is on the way to extinction.”

While Europe can, with serious effort to address climate change, cling on to some remnants of its icy inheritance, at the Tropics it is already game over.

The higher temperatures at the equator mean that mountain aeries simply aren’t high enough for ice to cling on. Last week, geophysicists in Indonesia announced that the arrival of an El Niño weather pattern was likely to accelerate the disappearance of the country’s Eternity Glaciers, which could vanish by 2026

In Venezuela, the country’s last river of ice, the Humboldt Glacier at 4,905m, has been reduced to just 2.5 acres and will soon be gone. According to Unesco, Africa will lose all of its glaciers, including what little ice is left on Mount Kilimanjaro.

The consequences for local people when those glaciers disappear can be severe. In Asia, 250 million people directly rely on the melt waters of the Himalayas and Hindu Kush with a further 1.6 billion reliant on rivers at least partly fed by mountain ice.

Even in wealthier parts of the world, the loss of glaciers is a problem. “Glaciers fill the gap during dry periods with meltwater, this is very important, but we will lose this role within the next decade,” Dr Huss says. “In Switzerland, we get 50 per cent of our electricity from hydropower and all of these are fed by glacial meltwater.”

While the localised impact of glacier gloss will be enormous, when it comes to the global scale scientists’ biggest fears lie elsewhere.

In Antarctica and Greenland, there is enough frozen water locked up to last centuries, perhaps millennia even, even with runaway climate change.

But that also means that the melting of this polar ice could have severe consequences.

Were the whole of the West Antarctic ice sheet to melt, it would result in three metres of global sea level rises. The rush of cold, dense freshwater would also likely severely disrupt ocean currents, sending global weather patterns haywire.

Even without such dramatic scenarios, Antarctica’s glaciers are so enormous that even individual rivers of ice can have a global footprint.

The Thwaites Glacier in west Antarctica is thought to have contributed 4 per cent of the recent rise in global sea levels. More importantly, it acts as a keystone to the West Antarctic ice sheet. If, as scientists at BAS fear, Thwaites reaches a tipping point and breaks up, the rest of the ice sheet could follow.

Dr Hillenbrand is part of the team at BAS monitoring Thwaites in the hope of ascertaining whether that tipping point really is approaching, or indeed, has already been crossed.

“The basic question is if what we are seeing is reversible or not,” he says.

As much as scientists can study and model the ice, however, the more humanity messes with the global climate, the more it has the chance to surprise and shock them, throwing their expectations out of the window.

Right now, it is deepest midwinter in Antarctica and its sea ice should be reaching its maximum extent. Instead, there is less ice than scientists have ever previously documented. Not only is that a sign of a climate in distress, but it exposes the Thwaites and other glaciers to further erosion from storms and melting from seawater.

Dr Hillenbrand, who has been visiting the Antarctic since 1994, is just back from an expedition to the Amundsen Sea, off West Antarctica. “It was quite scary, the fact that we didn’t encounter any sea ice at all. Quite worrying.”

Source

Analyzing hourly weather data from the past 20 years and between 1950 and 1969, Luke Parsons, a climate scientist at Duke University, and colleagues found that more US residents are being exposed more often to temperatures that are too hot for electric fans to cool people down – and might even be dangerous.

"We find that the geographic extent of temperatures too high for safe fan use is expanding, and the number of safe hours is decreasing," Parsons and colleagues explain in their published paper.

"In particularly hot locations, most afternoon hours during the hottest months of the year can exceed [safe] thresholds," they add.

The study, although focused only on the US, provides new insights at a time when much of North America, Europe, and China has sweltered through extreme summer heat made more likely by climate change.

It also follows efforts from scientists to refine estimates initially set by the World Health Organization of conditions where fans might exacerbate heat stress, pushing more hot air onto people than is wicked away.

Electric fans, research now shows, can still be safely used above 35 °C (95 °F) but their limit depends on who is using them and where.

In exceptionally humid or arid areas, electric fans tend to add to heat stress. Their use is also not recommended above 37-38 °C for older adults, especially those taking medications that have side effects of reduced sweating. Young, healthy adults can keep using fans up to 39 °C.

With those new recommendations at hand, Parsons and colleagues combined population data and temperature records to map out heat exposure across the continental US.

As a cooling strategy, electric fans are more affordable than air conditioning and use up to 50 times less electricity; helping to reduce power demand during heatwaves.

However, many locations across the US and northern Mexico "already experience ambient climate conditions that exceed the recommended temperature thresholds for safe fan use, even for the least sensitive demographic of healthy, younger adults," Parsons and colleagues write.

Hotspots of concern include inland areas of California along its border with Arizona, much of central Texas and Oklahoma, and along the US-Mexican border through Texas.

Communities in those locations now face more than 1,000 hours or over 44 days per year where temperatures are too hot for safe fan use. That's 200 more hours – or about 8 additional days each year – where temperatures are dangerously hot for fan users compared with 50-70 years ago.

Some of the hottest places were rural areas, where healthcare options may be thin on the ground. Low socioeconomic areas have also experienced the fastest increases in temperature extremes over time.

"These results highlight the need to direct resources to some of the most vulnerable communities who are the most impacted by climate change and the least likely to have the resources to cope with climate change," the team concludes.

The study has been published in GeoHealth.

Source

But new models suggest that such risky measures, like dimming the Sun, are not enough to save Antarctica now.

There's only one thing left that could, and it's the very same thing we've been failing to do for 40 years now: stop burning fossil fuels.

In the face of disastrous fires, floods, and other extreme weather events that have plagued the Northern Hemisphere's summer, there's been renewed interest in the potential of geoengineering. The incentive to try potentially dangerous solutions will only grow stronger as climate-driven disasters intensify.

"The window of opportunity to limit the global temperature increase to below 2 degrees is closing fast, so it is possible that technical measures to influence the climate will be seriously considered in the future," says University of Bern glaciologist Johannes Sutter.

So Sutter and colleagues decided to investigate what impact dimming the Sun would have on one of the fast approaching climate tipping points that researchers are most concerned about.

"Observations of ice flows in West Antarctica indicate that we are very close to a so-called tipping point or have already passed it," explains Sutter, "with our study, we therefore wanted to find out whether a collapse of the ice sheet could theoretically be prevented with solar radiation management."

The region is already missing concerning amounts of ice, despite it currently being the middle of winter there. This includes a reduction in the sea ice that dams West Antarctic glaciers in place on land. The melting of West Antarctica would lead to meters of sea level rise and all that extra fresh water in the sea could also contribute to a collapse of the ocean's currents, which are already slowing down.

The melt is happening faster than anticipated and already decimating wildlife.

Sutter and colleagues simulated ice sheet conditions under high, moderate, and low emissions pathways and four different stratospheric aerosol injection scenarios.

While the researchers' modeling showed dimming the Sun by spraying millions of tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere by 2050 could delay the ice collapse, it would only work in combination with decarbonization and only in the moderate or low emissions pathways.

"As long as atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations remain high, solar radiation management would most likely have to be continued for centuries, perhaps even millennia," the researchers explain.

If sun-blocking management strategies were to suddenly stop we'd risk termination shock, where an even more abrupt temperature increase would occur along with more severe consequences. Also, the other problems caused by the excess CO2 in our atmosphere would continue unabated.

"Solar radiation management could have impacts on regional weather patterns detrimental to society and the biosphere and other still-unknown effects, while not addressing the direct adverse effects of rising atmospheric CO2 such as ocean acidification," Sutter and team write.

What's more, the only scenario that revealed a chance at stopping the West Antarctic ice sheet collapse involved cutting back on carbon emissions.

"Our simulations show that the most effective way to prevent long-term collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is rapid decarbonization," warns Sutter.

This research was published in Nature Climate Change.

Source

Sunday, 10 September

• Who: China National Space Administration
• What: Long March 6A
• When: 4:30 a.m. UTC
• Where: Launch Complex 9A Taiyuan Satellite Launch Centre
• Why: The payload for this mission is unknown but it’s probably a satellite of some kind.

Friday, 15 September

• Who: Roscosmos
• What: Soyuz 2.1a (Soyuz MS-24 / ISS 70S)
• When: 3:44 p.m. UTC
• Where: Pad 31/6 Baikonur Cosmodrome
• Why: Roscosmos will use a Soyuz 2.1a rocket to launch a crewed mission to the International Space Station (ISS). The crew consists of Oleg Kononenko, Nikolai Chub, and Loral O’Hara. Once the astronauts are at the ISS, the craft will remain attached to the space station for six months to act as an emergency escape pod.

Recap

• The first launch we got last week was a Falcon 9 carrying 21 Starlink satellites that are part of the Starlink 103 mission. The first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket also touched down on a landing pad so that SpaceX can reuse it in the future.

• Next up, Chinese firm Galactic Energy performed the first sea launch of the Ceres-1 rocket which is pretty interesting to watch as we don’t typically see boats being used as a launchpad. The rocket launched four Tianqi satellites into orbit, they will act as part of an Internet of Things constellation.

• Another interesting launch we got last week was that of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ H-IIA launch vehicle which was carrying the X-Ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission (XRISM) and the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM). It’s interesting because while we have seen this rocket launch before, it’s not too common.

• Next, China launched a Long March 4C carrying the Yaogan 33 03 satellite. It’s a remote sensing satellite that will be used for scientific experimental research, marine and land resource census, agricultural product production estimation, and disaster prevention and mitigation.

• Lastly, Virgin Galactic performed its third commercial spaceflight. The private passengers who went to the edge of space included Ken Baxter, Timothy Nash, Adrian Reynard, and Beth Moses who was the Chief Astronaut Instructor.

That’s all we have this week, be sure to check in next time!

Source

NOAA Ocean Exploration researchers found a mysterious ‘golden egg’ like object while diving on a seamount in the Gulf of Alaska, the federal organization shared a blog on its official website. 

Initially, NOAA referred to the still-unidentified object as a ‘yellow hat’ but now it calls it a ‘golden egg’ or ‘golden orb’. 

“Amid a smattering of white sponges, this smooth, gold, dome-shaped specimen, a little over 10 centimeters (4 inches) in diameter, was tightly adhered to a rock. A small hole or tear near its base revealed a similarly colored interior," the blog read. 

“As cameras zoomed in, scientists were stumped as to its identification, with initial thoughts ranging from a dead sponge attachment, to coral, to an egg casing," it added. 

Sam Candio, an expedition coordinator at NOAA Ocean Exploration said, “Isn’t the deep sea so delightfully strange?"

He further elaborated, “While we were able to collect the 'golden orb' and bring it onto the ship, we still are not able to identify it beyond the fact that it is biological in origin."

“We likely won't learn more until we are able to get it into a laboratory setting where we can continue to pull from the collective expertise of the scientific community with more sophisticated tools than we are able to maintain on the ship. While somewhat humbling to be stumped by this finding, it serves as a reminder of how little we know about our own planet and how much is left to learn and appreciate about our ocean," Candio said in the NOAA's blog. 

The expedition coordinator also noted that it is still unclear if the golden dome is associated with a known species, a new species, or perhaps represents an unknown life stage of an existing one, NOAA said. 

He believes that the new species have the potential to reveal new sources for medical therapies and vaccines, food, energy, and other societal benefits and knowledge. The researchers are still working to unveil the ‘golden egg’ mystery. 

Source

On 12 September, a vaccine advisory group to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) once again will wrestle with the question of who in the United States should receive a booster shot to protect against COVID-19.

As several new variants and an uptick in COVID-19 hospitalization fuel concerns among some health officials and the public, three companies have made new COVID-19 vaccines that can be used as a booster (or as primary doses for the unvaccinated). The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is expected to approve at least one of these latest iterations before Tuesday’s meeting of CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which will address the question of who should receive it, and the panel’s discussion promises to be complicated.

Science spoke with clinicians, vaccine researchers, and biostatisticians about how they view the value of these latest shots. Several cautioned against falling into extremist camps—boosters are worthless or everyone must get boosters. “I just want people to have tempered expectations,” says Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at Emory University who specializes in evaluating vaccines. “There is room for reasonable debate about how much added value there is for a young, healthy person.” Two years ago, with the pandemic raging and vaccines dramatically cutting serious illness and death, there was little doubt about their value for everyone. Now, Dean says, “We’re in a very different situation than we were a few years ago.”

What is the new booster?

All FDA approved or authorized vaccines to date rely on introducing the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 into a person—either via messenger RNA (mRNA) encoding it or the protein directly—to generate antibodies and immune cells targeting the coronavirus. But spike keeps changing as the virus evolves so the Pfizer/BioNTech collaboration, Moderna, and Novavax have new shots delivering the spike from XBB 1.5, a variant of SARS-CoV-2 that was predominant at the time the companies formulated the latest vaccines but has since been eclipsed by other related mutants. The XBB family all derived from the Omicron variant that has dominated globally since November 2021, so the hope is the XBB 1.5 spike will confer protection against currently circulating strains.

Will the latest variants dodge the immune responses triggered by the new boosters?

Not the viruses now in widespread circulation. The two most common variants in the U.S. today, EG.5 and FL 1.51, accounted for about 35% of the infections in the 2 weeks preceding 3 September. Both descended from the XBB 1.5 strain now in circulation. Pfizer and BioNTech, Moderna, and Novavax have all issued press releases that say their new formulations trigger strong antibody responses against the XBB descendants.

A variant dubbed BA.2.86 has not yet spread far, but has received intense attention because it has an unusually high number of mutations in spike that, in theory, could allow it to dodge antibodies more effectively. “This one has become the scary variant du jour,” says immunologist John Moore of Weill Cornell Medicine. But a lab led by Dan Barouch of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and two others now have reported laboratory studies that suggest BA.2.86 doesn’t transmit well and remains susceptible to antibodies triggered by other XBB variants.

How much protection can I expect from a booster?

The worth of boosters depends on how you slice the (imperfect) data. When COVID-19 vaccines closely match the strain in circulation, as happened during the initial trials and in the first few months after they went into use, the shots can powerfully reduce cases of mild illness and, in some cases, prevent transmission altogether. Some evidence suggests the vaccines can also lower the risk of Long Covid. But all of these positive outcomes are bonuses.

The main goal of the vaccines is to prevent severe disease, hospitalization, and death, and the data show the boosters clearly help—for a time. An analysis published in the 26 May Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report looked at people in seven states since the bivalent booster became available in September 2022. It gauged vaccine effectiveness by comparing rates of COVID-19–linked hospitalization and critical illness (intensive care unit admission or death) in adults who had received this booster versus those who had not. In people who were not immunocompromised, the booster provided 62% and 69% protection against hospitalization and critical illness, respectively, for the first 59 days. But the immunity quickly waned to just under 50% for both between 60 and 119 days. Although protection against critical illness remained the same out to 179 days, it plummeted to 24% for hospitalization. The median age of the boosted group was 76 years old.

What if I have immunity from earlier infections?

“The vast majority of the U.S. population has been both vaccinated and infected, possibly multiple times,” Barouch says.

He and other vaccine researchers suspect that hybrid immunity may now be playing a large role in protecting people. “Despite the majority of people not getting boosted, severe disease remain very low,” he points out. So if you’ve had, say, a booster shot in the past year and then COVID-19, another booster may not offer you much extra protection against severe disease.

Do we really know enough about the value of boosters?

The CDC study was what is known as an observational, retrospective analysis to gauge effectiveness. The gold standard of clinical evidence for a vaccine is a randomized, controlled trial (RCT) that prospectively tracks people after they get immunized and measures efficacy.

“We know there can be substantial issues with observational studies,” Dean says. But RCTs would require large numbers of participants, likely followed for many months, and cost a pretty penny. “Who is paying for the trial?” she asks. “The company, the government?”

And by the time an RCT had results, the variants in circulation also likely would have changed. “Despite the limitations of observational studies, we probably do have a good ‘order-of-magnitude’ sense of the relative effectiveness” of boosters, Dean concludes. Countries also don’t conduct RCTs of the annual flu shots because the influenza virus shifts too fast; health officials make an educated guess as to what strain to use and hope for the best, and then conduct retrospective effectiveness studies to assess how well the vaccines worked.

Should I get a booster if I’m at higher risk of severe disease?

Everyone Science spoke with said yes, if you are elderly, immunocompromised, or have medical conditions that make you particularly susceptible to harm from the virus. “For people who are at high risk of severe disease, I think the answer is pretty simple and largely noncontroversial: A 4- to 6-month period of protection has a meaningful clinical benefit,”  Barouch says. “It’s clear that that population benefits from a boost and probably more than one boost for the year.”

What are the downsides of a recommendation to boost all ages?

It could cause confusion, and for some, the risks could outweigh potential benefits.

Paul Offit, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who sits on FDA’s own vaccine advisory group, has strongly opposed the broad recommendation for previous boosters and says it makes even less sense now. “The goal of the vaccine is to prevent severe illness,” he says, stressing that many people wrongly expect the shots to prevent mild disease or even transmission. “You can’t ask people to get a vaccine if you’re trying to prevent serious illness and there’s no clear evidence that you are at risk of serious illness.”

Offit, who is 72, already had COVID-19 once and is in good health, did not receive the bivalent booster himself and doesn’t plan to get the new one. “I think I have hybrid immunity and clearly hybrid immunity is best.” He says it comes down to the data. “If [CDC is] going to make that broad recommendation, show me why that is,” he says. “Take healthy 12- to 17-year-olds who have already gotten three doses of vaccine or two doses and natural infection. Are they getting hospitalized?”

He notes that the mRNA vaccines made by the Pfizer/BioNTech collaboration and Moderna also have a risk of causing a heart condition called myocarditis. It is rare and often quickly resolves itself, but, he says, “this is a real side effect.” There are also even rarer vaccine side effects that scientists are still trying to understand.

Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist who heads the Pandemic Center at Brown University, favors a recommendation that “laser targets” the populations that will benefit most from the boosters. “When you equate 20-year-olds with 65-year-olds that gives 65-year-olds a different idea of what’s necessary,” Nuzzo says, explaining that the elderly may not realize that shots are especially important for them. “Lumping everyone into one category for boosters may wind up leaving the most vulnerable behind.” She also worries that a broad recommendation can feed the fire of people who discount the value of boosters. “Some people have hijacked the booster debate, saying, ‘These same people think 10-year-olds should get boosted.’”

What are the upsides of a broad recommendation?

It might encourage more people to get boosters, and the benefits for people who are the least vulnerable, even if modest, might still outweigh the risks. “Acceptability, feasibility, clarity, and simplicity are the dominant issues,” says William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University. “I hope we make it as acceptable as possible. Don’t think about it, just get it.”

Schaffner, medical director of the National Foundation for Infectious Diseases, stresses that SARS-CoV-2 can cause serious illness for every age group, even in people who do not have risk factors. “We ought to open up this accordion and make it as similar to the flu vaccine as possible,” he says. “The more we make it a social norm for everyone to do, perhaps we will get beyond some of this vaccine ennui, vaccine hesitancy, and the political aspects that still surround these decisions.”

Could a booster protect me from Long Covid?

Some evidence suggests vaccination may offer incremental protection against the “postacute sequalae” of SARS-CoV-2 infection, which can include everything from subsequent heart attacks months later to the chronic, lingering symptoms of what is known as Long Covid. The largest study to address Long Covid prevention and vaccination looked at more than 30,000 people who sought care through the Veterans Health Administration and became infected after being immunized. The analysis compared them with millions of uninfected controls who were both vaccinated and unvaccinated. Vaccination before infection reduced the risk of Long Covid by about 15%, the researchers reported in the July 2022 issue of Nature Medicine. “Long Covid is not one thing,” cautions the lead author, Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis. “That risk reduction varies by organ system, and it has the most effect on lung and coagulation problems with blood clotting.”

But Al-Aly does not think Long Covid is needed to tilt the scales on the booster decision. “Even when you don’t factor in Long Covid, I’d still advocate for vaccines for all,” he says.

If I get a booster could that potentially protect others?

Possibly, but not for a long period. A booster might lower the amount of virus in people who do become infected, reducing what they shed. “You might want to time that booster so that you have that peak level of protection when you’re going to see your elderly relatives,” Nuzzo suggests.

What’s the bottom line?

Vaccine experts agree that booster shots will help the most vulnerable, but there’s little consensus about who else will benefit from them. “I know that some of my colleagues have different opinions, and they’re trying to be as thoughtful as I am,” Schaffner says. “I don’t think there’s one easy, correct, best answer.” And whatever the recommendations, people will have to decide for themselves whether they want another boost.

Source

As the summer winds to a close, and we reluctantly trade beach days and late sunsets for cooler weather and school or work, we also have to confront the reality that COVID will remain a part of our lives. The U.S. has already seen a summer bump in cases in recent weeks, with hospitalizations and wastewater levels of the virus creeping back up. So many people may be wondering when they can get another COVID vaccine.

According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the updated fall COVID booster will likely be available around mid-September—once the agency authorizes it. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will then issue recommendations on which groups of people can or should get vaccinated.

An FDA advisory committee met in June to determine which strains of the COVID-causing virus SARS-CoV-2 should be included in the fall booster. It settled on XBB.1.5, which has been the dominant variant in the U.S. for much of this year. Recently a new variant called BA.2.86 was detected, and it has more than 35 new mutations, compared with XBB.1.5. Cases of the BA.2.86—which, like XBB.1.5, is an offshoot of the well-known Omicron variant—have been found in the U.S., Denmark, Israel and other countries. The new variant currently makes up only a tiny fraction of cases, although SARS-CoV-2 is being sequenced and tracked far less closely today. Whether BA.2.86 is better at evading the immune system or causes more severe disease remains to be seen, but FDA scientists say the fall COVID booster and prior immunity should still help protect against serious illness.

“If authorized or approved, based upon the available evidence, the FDA believes these vaccines with a monovalent XBB.1.5 composition will provide the best available protection against the most serious consequences of the disease resulting from currently circulating variants,” the agency told Scientific American in an e-mail.

Experts that Scientific American spoke with agree that those who would benefit most from the fall COVID booster are people age 65 and above, as well as those who are chronically ill, immunocompromised or pregnant. “I always worry about the people for whom boosters would provide the greatest benefit, and that's people who are at high risk for severe illness. So people 65 and older and also people with underlying health conditions,” says Jennifer Nuzzo, a professor of epidemiology and director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University of Public Health.

Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center and an attending physician at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, agrees. “We should focus on those groups that are most at risk,” says Offit, who is a member of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee. “The goal is not to prevent all illness. The goal is to keep people out of the hospital.”

Stanley Perlman, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, adds that infants aged six months or older who have not been vaccinated are also at increased risk from COVID and could benefit from getting the vaccine’s primary series.

There is less evidence of an additional booster’s potential benefits for healthy people under age 65 who have already been vaccinated or infected, but it remains to be seen what the CDC will recommend. “For everyone else, it’s a little bit more complicated and a little bit less clear what the benefits are,” Nuzzo says. There is some evidence that boosting increases antibody levels in the short term, which might be helpful. “In the past, I’ve timed getting a booster dose to just give myself a little bit of potential extra protection during times when I know I’m more likely to have exposures like holiday travel, gathering with lots of people I don’t normally spend time with, etcetera,” she says. But she also advises waiting to see what the CDC recommends.

Offit notes that any vaccine or medicine has risks and benefits. In very rare cases, the mRNA COVID vaccines have been associated with myocarditis or pericarditis—inflammation of the heart muscle or lining, respectively. Although these conditions normally resolve on their own and can be caused by infections such as COVID itself, Offit says healthy young people may want to weigh the potential risks—however small—against the potential benefit of additional booster shots.

Others say the benefits outweigh the risks, however. Even though healthy adults ages 18 to 50 are much less likely to be hospitalized or die from COVID, it is still one of the leading causes of death in those age groups, Perlman says. “People that age don’t usually die—the vast, vast, vast majority don’t—but if you have a low frequency of dying, you want to protect yourself,” Perlman adds.

Like most vaccines, those for COVID are intended to prevent severe disease, not infection altogether. When the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were first authorized in late 2020, they were about 95 percent protective against even mild disease. But viruses evolve. And as SARS-CoV-2 did so, the level of antibodies produced in response to the vaccines also waned—so those vaccines no longer totally protected against infection. Immune cells known as T cells persist and continue to protect against severe disease, however.

People at the highest risk for severe COVID—those older than age 75 and those who are severely immunocompromised—may not mount a strong immune response to vaccination. If you’re one of these people, and you get COVID, your best bet is to test yourself promptly to confirm the infection and then, if eligible, obtain the antiviral drug Paxlovid as soon as possible. “If you look at people who get hospitalized or die [from COVID now], most haven’t had an antiviral,” Offit says. But it’s important to get the drug within the first three to five days of infection; otherwise it won’t have much effect.

Is it possible to have too many vaccine doses? One concern with vaccinating multiple times with the same strain of a virus is that it could train the immune system to only protect against that strain, a phenomenon known as immune imprinting. Offit says that is unlikely to be a big concern with the COVID vaccines, however.

As for when the best time to get vaccinated is, experts say it’s now probably worth waiting for the new booster to come out—but don’t delay too long. “The best time to get vaccinated is before you get sick,” Nuzzo says.

Offit and others recommend getting flu vaccinations as well. Flu season tends to peak a bit later in the winter, and vaccine protection tends to wane, so one could wait until late October to get the shot. But it’s also fine to get both the COVID and flu vaccines at the same time if that’s more convenient. This year adults age 60 and older and pregnant people will also be eligible for a respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine. RSV sends up to 160,000 older adults and up to 80,000 children to the hospital each year, and it kills up to 10,000 adults and 300 children. Those who are eligible should talk to their doctors about whether the vaccine is right for them.

As we head into yet another respiratory virus season, one thing is clear: COVID is here to stay. “It will join the pantheon of other winter respiratory viruses that cause hundreds of thousands to be hospitalized and thousands to die every year,” Offit says. “We are out of the pandemic, but the virus isn’t gone.”

Source

Doctors hope enough people get vaccinated to help avert another "tripledemic" like last year when hospitals were overwhelmed with an early flu season, an onslaught of RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, and yet another winter coronavirus surge.

COVID-19 hospitalizations have been steadily increasing since late summer, although not nearly as much as this time last year, and RSV already is on the rise in parts of the Southeast.

Approval of updated COVID-19 shots is expected within days. They are among the tools the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says will help put the U.S. in "our strongest position yet" to avoid another chaotic respiratory season.

"There will be a lot of virus this winter. That's why we want to get ahead of it," CDC chief Dr. Mandy Cohen said.

Here is what you need to know about fall vaccinations:

WHY MORE COVID-19 SHOTS?

The ever-evolving coronavirus isn't going away. Similar to how flu shots are updated each year, the Food and Drug Administration gave COVID-19 vaccine makers a new recipe for this fall.

The updated shots have a single target, an omicron descendant named XBB.1.5. It's a big change. The COVID-19 vaccines offered since last year are combination shots targeting the original coronavirus strain and a much earlier omicron version, making them very outdated.

Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax all have brewed new supplies.

The FDA will soon decide if each company has met safety, effectiveness and quality standards. Then the CDC must sign off before vaccinations begin. A CDC advisory panel is set to meet Tuesday to make recommendations on how best to use the latest shots.

Earlier this month, European regulators authorized Pfizer's updated vaccine for this fall, for adults and children as young as 6 months.

WILL THEY BE EFFECTIVE ENOUGH?

Health officials are optimistic, barring a new mutant.

As expected, XBB.1.5 has faded away in the months it took to tweak the vaccine. Today, there is a soup of different coronavirus variants causing illness and the most common ones are fairly close relatives. Recent lab testing from vaccine makers and other research groups suggest the updated shots will offer crossover protection.

Earlier vaccinations or infections have continued to help prevent severe disease and death but protection wanes over time, especially against milder infections as the virus continually evolves. While the FDA did allow seniors and others at high risk to get an extra booster dose last spring, most Americans haven't had a vaccination in about a year.

"The best thing people can do to maintain a normal way of life is to continue to get their booster shots," said Duke University vaccine expert David Montefiori.

WHO ALSO NEEDS A FLU VACCINE?

The CDC urges a yearly flu shot for pretty much everyone ages 6 months and up. The best time is by the end of October.

Like with COVID-19, influenza can be especially dangerous to certain groups including the very young, older people and those with weak immune systems and lung or heart disease.

There are multiple kinds of flu vaccines to choose from, including a nasal spray version for certain younger people. More important, there are three shots specifically recommended for seniors to choose from because they are proven to do a better job revving up an older adult's immune system.

CAN I GET A FLU SHOT AND COVID-19 SHOT AT THE SAME TIME?

Yes.

The CDC says there is no difference in effectiveness or side effects if people get those vaccines simultaneously, although one in each arm might be more comfortable.

WHAT IS THIS NEW RSV VACCINE?

RSV is a cold-like nuisance for most people, and not as well-known as the flu. But RSV packs hospitals every winter and can be deadly for children under 5, the elderly and people with certain high-risk health problems. Most notorious for inflaming babies' tiny airways, leaving them wheezing, it's also a common cause of pneumonia in seniors.

RSV vaccines from GSK and Pfizer are approved for adults 60 and older. The CDC is advising seniors to ask their doctor if they should get the one-dose shot.

The FDA also has approved Pfizer's RSV vaccine to be given late in pregnancy so moms-to-be pass the protection to their newborns. CDC recommendations on that use are expected later this month.

WHAT ABOUT BABIES AND RSV?

There is one more new shot parents may hear about this fall: an injection of lab-made antibodies to guard babies from RSV.

That is different than a vaccine, which teaches the body to make its own infection-fighting antibodies, but is similarly protective.

The FDA recently approved Beyfortus, from Sanofi and AstraZeneca. The one-dose drug is recommended for all infants younger than 8 months before their first RSV season.

Source

Despite this, investments in reducing anemia have failed to substantially reduce the massive burden of anemia globally over the last few decades.

People become anemic when their blood lacks enough healthy red blood cells to carry oxygen throughout the body. This decreased oxygen delivery causes many of the most common symptoms of anemia, including fatigue, shortness of breath, lightheadedness, difficulty concentrating and challenges with work and daily life tasks.

In addition to its direct health effects, anemia can inhibit brain development and fine motor skills in children and heighten the risk of stroke, cardiovascular disease, dementia and other chronic illnesses in older adults. Anemia during pregnancy can lead to increased rates of anxiety and depression, early labor, postpartum hemorrhage, stillbirth and low birth weight. Infections for both mother and baby are also more likely when the mother is anemic.

We are global health researchers with expertise in epidemiological modeling of anemia alongside other maternal, neonatal and nutritional disorders.

Our work is part of the Global Burden of Disease Study, a large research study comprehensively estimating health loss due to hundreds of diseases, injuries and risk factors around the globe. Through our analysis, we have produced annual estimates of anemia prevalence by underlying cause for 204 countries and territories, by age and sex, from 1990 to the present. We have collected thousands of data points across hundreds of sources to produce the most comprehensive picture of anemia burden.

Anemia is a widespread problem

Anemia is diagnosed by a simple blood test and can be caused by a number of underlying conditions.

Decreases in healthy red blood cells can occur due to excessive loss of existing red blood cells, such as through bleeding or destruction by the body's immune system. Anemia can also occur due to decreased production of new red blood cells or changes in the normal structure or lifespan of red blood cells that make them less effective.

Globally, anemia is the third-largest cause of disability: Our recent study found that nearly 1 in 4 people has anemia. This burden is concentrated among children younger than 5 years and adolescent girls and women, one-third of whom are anemic. Anemia rates are particularly high in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where we estimated that 40%—or two out of every five people—have anemia.

Anemia is often measured by the amount of hemoglobin – an oxygen-carrying protein within red blood cells – that a person has in their blood.

Reductions in anemia rates have been slow and uneven, dropping from 28% to 24% globally from 1990 to 2021. Adult males have fared better, with young children and adolescent girls and women—who bear the highest burden of anemia—showing the least progress. On the positive side, there has been a shift toward milder forms of anemia, which result in much less disability compared to severe anemia.

Reducing anemia means tackling underlying causes

Substantially reducing anemia globally is complicated by its many underlying causes. Dietary iron deficiency is the most common cause across the globe. But other important drivers of anemia include blood disorders such as sickle cell disease or thalassemias, infectious diseases like malaria and hookworm, gynecologic and obstetric conditions, inflammation and chronic diseases.

Anemia in adolescent and adult women often occurs due to loss of blood from menstruation and increased needs for blood for the developing baby during pregnancy. Much of the anemia burden in this group is likely related to lack of menstrual education, inadequate options for effectively managing menstrual problems in those who have them, and unmet needs for family planning services. These are also important drivers among transgender men and nonbinary people who menstruate.

Young children have increased requirements for iron as their bodies grow, and malnutrition is a common cause of anemia in this group globally.

Iron supplementation has historically been the primary form of treatment and prevention of anemia. This includes large-scale addition of iron to foods such as flour, rice or milk, as well as providing oral iron tablets and intravenous iron, depending on the context and severity.

Some research has suggested that less than half of people with anemia will fully respond to supplemental iron if the underlying causes of iron deficiency remain untreated. For example, cells in our bodies sequester iron as part of the immune response to some infections. Supplementing with iron without treating the underlying infection will do little to solve the iron deficiency in the long run, and it may even be harmful.

Additional interventions include HIV treatment and prevention, with pre-exposure prophylaxis and anti-retroviral therapy. Preventing initial infection with HIV or suppressing the effects of the virus once infected will reduce the anemia burden related to HIV/AIDS.

Other strategies include malaria control methods, such as insecticide-treated bed nets and vaccination, and monitoring and prevention of chronic illnesses such as chronic kidney disease and inflammatory conditions. In combination with a robust supplementation program, these interventions could meaningfully reduce the global burden of anemia.

Anemia makes it hard for nearly 2 billion people worldwide to learn in school, perform at work and take care of their families. We hope our findings will allow for more comprehensive intervention and treatment plans, especially for the most vulnerable—adolescent and adult women, children and the elderly.

Provided by The Conversation 

Source

The Federal Aviation Administration said it closed its investigation into SpaceX’s failed debut of Starship, the world’s biggest rocket. The agency is requiring SpaceX to take 63 corrective actions and to apply for a modified FAA license before launching again.

FAA official said multiple problems led to the April launch explosion, which sent pieces of concrete and metal hurtling for thousands of feet (meters) and created a plume of pulverized concrete that spread for miles (kilometers) around.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk said in the accident’s aftermath that he improved the 394-foot (120-meter) rocket and strengthened the launch pad. A new Starship is on the redesigned pad, awaiting liftoff. It will fly empty, as before.

During the initial test flight, the rocketship had to be destroyed after it tumbled out of control shortly after liftoff from Boca Chica Beach. The wreckage crashed into the Gulf of Mexico. SpaceX said fuel leaks during ascent caused fires to erupt at the tail of the rocket, severing connection with the main flight computer and leading to a loss of control.

That flight “provided numerous lessons learned,” the company said in a statement.

NASA wants to use Starship to land astronauts back on the moon in another few years. Musk’s ultimate goal is to build a fleet of Starships to carry people and supplies to Mars.

Source

A research team comprising the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) and the Universities of Birmingham, Reading, Surrey and Southern Queensland, found that ozone substantially changes the size and scent of floral odour plumes given off by flowers, and that it reduced honeybees' ability to recognise odours by up to 90% from just a few metres away.

Ground-level ozone typically forms when nitrogen oxide emissions from vehicles and industrial processes react with volatile organic compounds emitted from vegetation in the presence of sunlight.

Our study provides robust evidence that the changes due to ground-level ozone on floral scent cause pollinators to struggle to carry out their crucial role in the natural environment also with implications for food security.

Professor Christian Pfrang, University of Birmingham

Professor Christian Pfrang from the University of Birmingham who collaborated on the research said: “Our study provides robust evidence that the changes due to ground-level ozone on floral scent cause pollinators to struggle to carry out their crucial role in the natural environment also with implications for food security.”

The findings suggest that ozone is likely to be having a negative impact on wildflower abundance and crop yields. International research has already established that ozone has a negative impact on food production because it damages plant growth.

Dr Ben Langford, an atmospheric scientist at UKCEH who led the study said: "Some 75% of our food crops and nearly 90% of wild flowering plants depend, to some extent, upon animal pollination, particularly by insects. Therefore, understanding what adversely affects pollination, and how, is essential to helping us preserve the critical services that we rely upon for production of food, textiles, biofuels and medicines, for example."

The researchers used a 30-m wind tunnel at Surrey University to monitor how the size and shape of odour plumes changed in the presence of ozone. As well as decreasing the size of the odour plume the scientists found that the scent of the plume changed substantially as certain compounds reacted away much faster than others.

Honeybees were trained to recognise the same odour blend and then exposed to the new, ozone-modified odours. Pollinating insects use floral odours to find flowers and learn to associate their unique blend of chemical compounds with the amount of nectar it provides, allowing them to locate the same species in the future.

The research showed that towards the centre of plumes, 52% of honeybees recognised an odour at 6 metres, decreasing to 38% at 12 m. At the edge of plumes, which degraded more quickly, 32% of honeybees recognised a flower from 6 m away and just a tenth of the insects from 12 m away.

The study indicates that ozone could also affect insects’ other odour-controlled behaviours such as attracting a mate.

The research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council, part of UK Research and Innovation, and was published in the journal Environmental Pollution.

Professor Christian Pfrang concluded: "We know that air pollution has a detrimental effect on human health, biodiversity and the climate, but now we can see how it prevents bees and other pollinating insects from carrying out their key job. This should act as a wake-up call to take action on air pollution and help safeguard food production and biodiversity for the future."

Source

Source

In a first, researchers in China have used pigs to grow early-stage kidneys made up of mostly human cells. The advance is a step closer to producing organs in animals that could one day be transplanted to people.

More than 100,000 people in the United States are on the national transplant waiting list, and 17 people across the country die each day waiting for a donor organ, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network. Kidneys are the most in demand, with nearly 89,000 Americans needing one as of September.

“The ability to generate human organs in pigs would make a significant impact in reducing the number of patients on a waiting list in the United States and around the world,” says Mary Garry, a professor of medicine at the University of Minnesota who studies chimeric organisms—those that contain cells from different species—but wasn’t involved in the research. Garry’s team showed in 2020 and 2021 that it was possible to grow humanized blood vessels and skeletal muscle in pigs.

The kidney (shown in red) inside this pig embryo is made up of mostly human cells.

Credit: Wang, Xie, Li, Li, and Zhang et al./Cell Stem Cell

Attempts at making animal chimeras in the lab began decades earlier. In 1984, researchers at the Institute of Animal Physiology in Cambridge, England, reported that they had created goat-sheep chimeras by mixing embryos from the two species. More recently, news leaked in 2019 that scientists had made the first embryos that were part human and part monkey. (They subsequently destroyed them.) The work was eventually published in 2021. Led by Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte, then a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California, the team carried out their experiments in China, where they said monkey embryos were cheaper and easier to obtain.

In the current study, a team led by scientists at Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health injected more than 1,800 pig embryos with human stem cells and then transferred them into the wombs of 13 female pigs. They allowed the chimeric embryos to grow for up to 28 days, then stopped the pregnancies to remove and examine the embryos. They collected five, which all had kidneys that were developing normally and contained up to 65 percent human cells. The research was published September 7 in the journal Cell Stem Cell. (The study authors didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for an interview.)

“It is remarkable to see that about 60 percent of the primordial pig kidney contained human cells,” says Jun Wu, a stem cell biologist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, who wasn’t involved in the new study. Wu, Belmonte, and their colleagues were the first to grow embryos with mixed human and pig tissues, a feat they reported in a 2017 study. In that paper, Wu and his team also described growing a rat pancreas, heart, and eyes in a developing mouse.

Integrating cells from pigs and humans, however, has proven more difficult than combining cells from rats and mice, which are much closer genetic relatives. Pig cells tend to outcompete human cells when transplanted into animal tissue, causing the human cells to quickly die off. As a result, the contribution of human cells in the chimeric embryos Wu’s group produced was low. This study, he says, is a big improvement.

There’s another challenge with growing a humanized organ inside an animal: Organs need room to develop, and if there’s already an existing organ, it’s hard to grow a new version. “There’s no place for it,” says Paul Knoepfler, a stem cell biologist at UC Davis, who wasn’t involved in the current study. “So what these researchers tried to do was make space for a human organ to grow inside of an animal.”

To do this, the researchers used the gene editing tool Crispr to knock out two genes in the pig embryos needed for kidney development. This stopped the embryos from forming pig kidneys and created a “niche,” or microenvironment, where the humanized kidneys could take root instead.

They then turned a batch of regular human cells into pluripotent stem cells—which have the ability to turn into any cell type in the body. In these cells, they turned up the expression of two genes to prevent them from dying and to improve their chances of integrating with the pig cells. The chimeric embryos were made by injecting the human stem cells into the pig embryos. Before transferring them to the pig wombs, the researchers gave the embryos a special cocktail of nutrients to help both the human and pig cells stay alive, since these cells usually have different needs.

When the embryos were removed, the kidneys had formed structures typical of that stage of development: the fine tubes needed to remove waste and the buds of cells that later turn into ducts that connect the kidney to the bladder. But since the pregnancies were stopped early, it’s unknown whether the kidneys would have continued developing normally and become functioning organs that could be used in transplants.

Knoepfler says the results are exciting, but he raised concerns about the two genes the researchers edited to make the human cells more likely to survive when transplanted: MYCN and BCL2. When these genes are overexpressed, they can cause cancer. He says there would need to be extensive animal testing to determine whether organs grown from these edits could cause cancer if they were transplanted into humans.

For now, scientists are still a long way from growing a fully human organ inside a pig. “Humans diverged from pigs about 80 million years ago, so growing human cells in a pig embryo is a significant—and, at the moment, inefficient—task,” Garry says.

Why pigs then, when they differ so much from humans? Scientists think they’d make ideal donor animals for people because of their similar anatomies and organ size. And right now, transplant centers can’t keep up with the demand for organs. The average wait time for a kidney transplant is three to five years at most centers in the US but can be longer in certain parts of the country.

Pig organs can’t simply be transferred into human recipients, though. Pig tissue is swiftly rejected by the human immune system, and pigs also harbor innate viruses that could be passed on to transplant patients.

To avoid these scenarios, researchers elsewhere are trying to genetically engineer pigs so that their organs won’t be rejected if they are transplanted into people. In January 2022, David Bennett became the first person to receive a genetically engineered pig heart. He survived two months with the organ before dying of heart failure. Researchers are now testing engineered pig kidneys in brain-dead donors.

Other groups are trying to grow human organs from stem cells in the lab. So far, scientists have only been able to produce tiny balls of tissue the size of peas. Known as organoids, these 3D blobs have some of the same cells and structures as the organs they’re meant to mimic but are still far from the real thing.

Even if scientists manage to grow full-fledged humanized organs inside pigs, there’s no guarantee they’d be compatible with the human immune system. “Even if you get 90 percent human cells, 10 percent pig, there's a high likelihood that the recipient would have to stay on immunosuppression in the same way that a typical organ-transplant recipient would,” Knoepfler says.

And that’s the big question facing any technique that aims to generate transplant organs for patients: “Will an organ, regardless of how you make it, be accepted by the recipient?” Knoepfler asks.

Source