Influence on mammals and birds by the H5N1 influenza outbreak: a case study in South Africa, South Korea and Zimbabwe, a virologist says
Until this particular outbreak, all mammalian infections could be attributed to direct contact with virus-contaminated material, says Hualan Chen, a virologist at the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute in China. Animals that ingest wild bird droppings can be exposed to the disease. This H5N1 virus may pose a higher risk to public health, according to Chen.
The potential risk to wild animals is greater. Bird flu has consistently caused high levels of sickness and death among wild birds and mammals over the past year, and how the new variant will affect that trend remains to be seen. Puryear says we simply don’t know.
Measures taken to prevent the new strain from spreading beyond the farm seem to have been “vigorous, comprehensive and successful”, says infectious-disease specialist William Schaffner at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee.
The researchers found that in most years, influenza, especially the H5N1 variant, was reported at the highest frequency of any infectious disease — 776 outbreaks have been documented since 1996.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Saudi Arabia and China each reported over twenty disease outbreaks, of which 218 were of flu. Few reports had any correlation with Eastern Europe.
A study on the dissemination of COVID-19 in Cambodia and the response of the national institute of public health to the case of the Cambodian girl
The database will allow researchers to look at the factors that determine how much money is spent to suppress a specific outbreak, or how external circumstances such as conflicts or weather events affect them, says Katz. The study states that the reports don’t mention all known outbreaks in every region.
The WHO is drafting a publication detailing the decision-making process, as well as restructuring its website in order to make the reports easier to find. The structure of the DON reports was changed after the time that the study analysed. The WHO states that it’s a learning organization and that it extends to the DON.
The Cambodian Ministry of Health has swabbed 12 of her close contacts, and only her 49-year-old father has tested positive. There is no evidence that a strain of H5N1 has spread between people. Investigations into how the girl was exposed to the virus are underway.
The sample was transferred from the National Institute of Public Health in Cambodia to us. We got the sample at 5 pm on February 22nd and it was analysed within 24 hours. This is an example of the way that COVID-19 has made it easier to sequence and share data.
The whole genomes of both sputnams were amplified in one go because the viral load was high. If the viral load had been high, we would have had to wait a couple of weeks to grow it in cells or eggs and get enough virus to sequence. The focus was to make sure that the virus got to the public domain as quickly as possible.
Researchers have been keeping a close eye on 2.3. 2.1c for a while and have some information to use in determining its transmissibility. We have to treat it with paramount importance whenever a zoo notic spillover occurs.
Viruses, especially RNA viruses such as influenza, are extremely promiscuous and will quickly adapt to a new host. We’ve seen this with the virus that causes COVID-19. The chance to adapt to a new host is shown by the spillover. That is concerning because that adaptation could result in a virus that could potentially transmit between people. Getting ahead of that, and blocking any potential for transmission, as well as understanding what the virus does in its new host, is critically important and can inform the outbreak response.
We are attempting to sequence the father’s samples but he seems to have had a lower viral load which makes it difficult to quickly get a sequence. We will try some more targeted approaches, as well as isolating the virus. But often, there isn’t enough viral load to get more than just partial sequences.
SARS: Six ways to write better e-mails, avian flu and self-driving cargo ships: what can we learn from the case of COVID-19?
I don’t know why the virus has spilled over from poultry to people in this case, after some ten years of it not being detected. A lot of factors still need to be investigated, but there have been a lot of global changes in agricultural practices owing to the COVID-19 pandemic that could have created the conditions for a spillover.
We know that, in Cambodia, the pandemic increased the amount of backyard poultry farming. Many people, for example tour guides, couldn’t work and had to supplement their incomes and sources of food for their families. All over the world, people are still struggling, which has resulted in changes in agricultural practices that can increase spillover risk. It is possible that changes to a person’s health can make them more vulnerable to being bitten by an STD.
We will also isolate and grow this virus in our biosafety-level-3 facility, which will help us to develop tools to better understand the epidemiology of this case and the virus in the region. Blood tests can be developed for the presence of antibodies in people who have been in contact with the girl and her family. Laboratory studies of the transmissibility of the virus can be carried out in animal models, such as ferrets.
There were six ways to write better e-mails, a child who died from avian flu, and self-driving cargo ships that had something in common with the mass deaths of birds around the world.
Self-driving ships as a route to combat the COVID 19 pandemic and the declining lion population on Namibia’s beaches
Namibia’s lions are back to prowling the country’s beaches, nearly four decades after they disappeared from these areas. The lions stopped hunting on the beaches in the 1980’s, after their population was almost wiped out. Even as their numbers recovered, they didn’t return, and scientists thought the knowledge of how to hunt seals and flamingos had been lost. When a drought in 2015 wiped out zebras and other desert prey, three young lionesses led a coastal hunting revival along a 40-kilometre stretch of beach that is also a popular fishing and camping spot. To keep both people and the animals safe, a virtual fence now sends out alerts every time lions approach the area.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the US Department of Energy classified a document from the year 2021, which said that the COVID 19 epidemic probably emerged from a laboratory leak. The DoE has reportedly said that it has a low confidence, which means the analysis is based on scant or questionable information. The World Health Organization and some scientists believe that the lab leak hypothesis is alive and well. “There simply is no hard evidence either way,” says science and security researcher Filippa Lentzos. Others, like virologist Angela Rasmussen, say “it is incorrect to frame this issue as scientifically undecided”, citing multiple lines of evidence and studies that indicate the pandemic emerged from animals associated with the live animal trade.
Pilot projects are already showing the potential of self-driving ships as big as those that carry most global trade. Increasing the efficiency of large vessels and the use of cleaner fuels should reduce environmental impacts. It could reduce the risk to seafarers who are in short supply. Seven researchers highlight the practical, legal and economic implications that must be resolved to harness the benefits of such vessels.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00607-y
Managing Avian Influenza in the 21st Century: A Top Ten-Six Minute E-mail Address for Prospective Scientists
I only have to send one great e-mail a day, but most people aren’t so lucky. Laboratory manager-turned graduate student Benjamin Tsang offers lessons he has learnt for writing e-mails that make your principal investigator (PI) sit up and take notice. Keep messages concise, include actionable words and clear deadlines, and say when you’ll be back in touch, he suggests. And take advantage of features offered by some systems, such as a ten-second delay after pressing the send button that lets you act on sender’s remorse.
The Arab region’s moves into space exploration are building on centuries-old discoveries of the Islamic Golden Age. A sweeping history takes us from the legendary House of Wisdom in Baghdad to today’s efforts by the United Arab Emirates to become a leader in space exploration.
Scientists are working on a vaccine that could solve the problem. There is a vaccine that uses only a small part of theviruses’s DNA that is being developed. A test targeting other genes could tell if a bird has been vaccine or not.
Nichola Hill, an ecologist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, said that poultry farmers could raise a wider range of bird breeds to combat the disease. In Asia, where farmers have a long history of navigating outbreaks of bird flu, some have switched to breeds that are less susceptible to the virus.
Wildlife researchers are attempting to understand the extent to which wild bird will be affected by avian flu and the impact on the spread of the disease. As well as helping scientists target conservation measures, this research could give farmers a better idea of when bird flu might be heading their way if, for example, it is combined with when certain birds are known to migrate.
Cleaning up grain that could attract wild birds and washing boots before entering a farm are some of the ways that knowledge could be used to protect poultry. “It’s extremely hard to do that 365 days of the year,” Hill says. Shorter time frames are more feasible.
Hill believes humanity can keep the virus in check. She says that the question is control and prevention of a human pandemic at this point. I think both of those goals are doable.
Hunter-gatherers sought warm climates during a long freeze. Plus, asteroid lost one million kilograms when it collided with the DART spacecraft, and how to stop bird flu becoming a pandemic.
The first test of planetary defence, Dimorphos, the asteroid that was accidentally hit by NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, revealed how anxiety caused the brain to race
The asteroid that was deliberately hit with NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft last September lost one million kilograms of rock, gained a 10,000-kilometre-long debris tail and now completes its orbit 33 minutes faster than before the collision. A detailed analysis of what happened when DART smashed into the Great-Pyramid-sized asteroid Dimorphos has revealed how successful this first test of planetary defence really was. The strike on the asteroid caused a large spray of rubble to fly out, which increased the impact force and added oomph to the crash.
According to a study in mice anxiety can cause the heart to race. When researchers artificially raised the rodents’ heart rate, the animals became less willing to explore their environment, suggesting they were more anxious. Switching off the brain circuitry involved reduced the mice’s anxiety. The discovery of the same brain loop in both acute fear and chronic anxiety could provide clues about how to treat anxiety in humans. “You can’t just look at the brain if you want to understand fear,” says neuroscientist Sarah Garfinkel.
European hunter-gatherers holed up in what is now Spain to escape the last ice age, which covered large parts of the continent with glaciers for several millennia. Researchers analysed DNA from 356 individuals who lived in Europe and western Asia between 35,000 and 5,000 years ago. The humans who had sought out the warmer climate on the Iberian Peninsula repopulated Western Europe after the deep freeze ended. This explains how a genetic signature that first showed up in 35,000-year-old remains popped up again in populations tens of thousands of years later — a fact that had remained a mystery until now.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00631-y
Climate in Northern Ireland: The first lumpy’s outbreak in Rajasthan could not be attributed solely to the climate, but climate certainly played a role
UK researchers are optimistic that they will regain access to the European Union’s €95.5-billion (US$101-billion) Horizon Europe funding scheme, after a Brexit agreement on the status of Northern Ireland was reached earlier this week. The United Kingdom rejoins as an associate country which gives scientists the same level of financial access as before but no say in which fields are prioritized in the next iteration. James Wilsdon says that the most difficult thing to rebuild is the collaboration networks that have been atrophied over the past few years.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is one of the best examples of why scientists are important to decision makers. The advisory bodies for other challenges are not the same, and aren’t for want of trying. The way the IPCC came to be — with many government climate scientists among its founders — cannot easily be replicated, explains a Nature editorial. “The world might never again see a research assessment on the scale that the IPCC pioneered, but that is far from the only way for policymakers to access — and act on — scientific evidence.”
The first outbreak of the disease in the country occurred last year, when millions of cows became contaminated with a highly contagious virus. Climate change could have been a factor in the emergence of the virus, according to researchers. In the northern state of Rajasthan there are half a million cows that have died. The state’s milk production crashed by 21%, at the same time as resident farmers were struggling with failing crops. Warm, humid climates support the disease-carrying insects’ reproduction, and Rajasthan has seen a gradual increase in heavy rainfall days and average temperatures over the past few decades. “It’s difficult to attribute the cause of lumpy’s spread to solely climate, but climate definitely played a role,” says veterinary epidemiologist Rathish R.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00631-y
Recommendations on auditing undergraduate psychology reading materials for diversity of under-represented groups, regions, and sub-discrimination groups
“Simply expanding reading resources is not enough,” write psychologists Sakshi Ghai, Lee de-Wit and Yan Mak after they revealed a striking lack of voices from under-represented groups and regions in their university’s undergraduate psychology reading material. The team has four recommendations for others wanting to do similar audits: tailor the definition of diversity to your field, start by dissecting the curriculum’s foundational courses, gather diversity data while remaining aware of its limits, and place people from minority ethnic groups at the heart of the audit.