The bird flu outbreak may become a major epidemic

The spread of H5N1 in the bird population is regulated by the quality of country’s public health systems: how many outbreaks has the world?

H5N1 has become entrenched in wild bird populations over the past year, but there are “some small Band-Aids we can put on things”, says epidemiologist David Stallknecht at the University of Georgia in Athens. Administering vaccine to wild birds is difficult. So, for the most part, birds have to develop resistance to the disease through being infected, and many will die in that process.

But Puryear thinks that because the new variant contains genetic material from gull flu, it’s likely that at least some of its genetic changes arose in gulls before entering the mink farm. This means that a strain containing those mutations is probably still circulating in the bird population. If the new strain would begin to sicken people, health authorities could quickly produce a vaccine, and the drug oseltamiflu could help reduce severity of the disease.

William Schaffner, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Tennessee, said that precautions were taken to prevent the new strain from going beyond the farm.

Other variations can be explained by the quality of country’s health systems. For example, Egypt has reported 115 outbreaks — mostly of influenza — in the 23-year time span that Katz’s team analysed. But no outbreaks have ever been reported by nearby Libya, which has an underfunded and unstable health system as a result of two civil wars during that period. According to Timothy Brewer, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, the analysis shows that the WHO cannot track all outbreaks around the world, and that it must pick and choose.

China reported the most outbreaks — 262 in total, of which 218 were of influenza — followed by Saudi Arabia, which documented MERS 179 times, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which reported 105 Ebola outbreaks (See ‘Disease outbreaks’). Few reports were associated with countries in Eastern Europe.

A WHO perspective on the COVID-19 pandemic: Sequencing zoonotic chicken bovine viral genome with the PLANK database

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 notes that don’t mention all the known outbreaks in every region.

The WHO could make the DON reports better by increasing transparency around how itPrioritizes Notifications, creating more specifically criteria for an outbreak’s inclusion, and adding information about contextual factors such as climate hazard or animal populations.

I would like to know more information about the poultry samples surrounding the case. We can then compare those viral sequences with historical viral data, for example from live-bird-market surveillance, from those regions of Cambodia, to see whether anything major has changed, or whether something is occurring in the poultry population that is forcing the virus into, for example, more risky phenotypes, or to pose a higher risk to people.

The sample was first tested at the National Institute of Public Health in Phnom Penh, and then transferred to us. We received the sample at about 5 p.m. on 22 February, and it was sequenced within 24 hours. This really exemplifies the way that the COVID-19 pandemic has increased our capacity to sequence and share data very quickly.

The sample’s highviral load enabled us to amplify the entire flu genome in a single shot. If the viral load had been low, which is often the case, we would have had to wait about three days to grow it in cells or eggs to get enough virus to sequence. The goal was to get the virus into the public domain as quickly as possible.

Researchers have been watching 2.3. 2.1c for a long time and have information on its transmissibility and pathogenicity. But anytime there is a zoonotic spillover, we must treat it with the utmost importance.

The promiscuous nature of the viruses makes them easily adapt to a new host. We’ve seen this with the virus that causes COVID-19. A spillover indicates that the virus now has a chance to adapt to a new host. That’s concerning because it might cause a virus to be transmitted between people. Getting ahead of that, as well as understanding what the virus does in it’s new host, is important and can inform the outbreak response.

We are attempting to sequence samples from the father, but he seems to have had a lower viral load, which makes it a little bit harder to rapidly get a sequence. We are going to try some more targeted approaches and isolating the virus. Sometimes there is not enough viral load to get more than a few moments.

Isolating and Growing H1N1 in the Camelot – a case study of child deaths in the COVID-19 epidemic

I don’t know why the virus was left out in the cold for so long. There have been global changes in agricultural practices that have been caused by the COVID-19 vaccine’s impact on the world.

The amount of backyard poultry farming increased in Cambodia because of the H1N1 virus. Tour guides had to save money and find other sources of food for their families as they couldn’t work. In light of the struggles of people all over the world, changes to agricultural practices which can increase spillover risk have been made. Changes in people’s health, for example being flabby or starving, can cause people to be more susceptible to getting infections.

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. We could use blood samples from the father, other family members and the broader community to develop tests for the presence of an immune system marker that can indicate past infections. The isolates will also be essential for laboratories around the world to study the virus’s transmissibility and pathogenicity, including in animal models, such as ferrets.

A child who died of the H5N1 bird flu strain this month had a different variant of it than the rest of the world.

The COVID-19 pandemic emerged from a laboratory leak and the need for self-driving ships to protect seafarers

Namibia’s lions are back to prowling the country’s beaches, nearly four decades after they disappeared from these areas. In the 1980s, Namibia’s lions stopped hunting on the beaches after their population was almost wiped out. Scientists thought the knowledge of how to hunt seals and Flamingos had been lost because they didn’t return as their numbers recovered. Three young lionesses led a revival in coastal hunting along a 40 kilometer stretch of beach that is popular for fishing and camping after the desert zebras were wiped out by a dry spell. If a virtual fence is not in place, lions are able to approach the area.

A classified 2021 document from the US Department of Energy (DoE), reported in The Wall Street Journal, concluded that the COVID-19 pandemic probably emerged from a laboratory leak. The DoE said it had low faith in the analysis, which is based on scant or questionable information. Some scientists as well as the World Health Organization say there is still a possibility of a lab leak. “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. Enhancing safety, increasing efficiency, and reducing environmental impacts should all be achieved with the help of cleaner fuel and engines. It could also reduce the risk to seafarers, who are in short supply. The implications of the vessels must be understood to derive their benefits.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00607-y

What makes a great e-mail? Benjamin Tsang tells us what to do if you don’t know how to reply

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. He suggests keeping messages concise, having deadlines and saying when you’ll be back in touch. You can take advantage of features such as a ten-second delay after pressing a send button that lets you act on sender’s remorse.

The discoveries of the Golden Age of Islam have underpinned the Arab region’s moves into space exploration. 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.

Vaccines could help to protect certain species, Stallknecht says. Bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), for example, can be severely affected by the virus, and some scientists are worried about the long-term impact of bird flu on the population. But the strategy could only be used for species under grave threat when “you’re doing everything you possibly can to keep them on the planet”, he says.

The University of Massachusetts’ Nichola Hill says poultry farmers could raise a wider variety of bird breeds to stop the disease. Farmers in Asia have a long history of dealing with bird flu and some have switched to breeds that are less susceptible to the disease.

At the moment, Stallknecht and other wildlife researchers are trying to understand which species of wild bird are most severely affected by avian flu, and the implications this has for 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.

That knowledge could help farmers target measures to protect poultry, such as cleaning up grain that could attract wild birds and washing boots before entering farms. “It’s extremely hard to do that 365 days of the year,” Hill says. Shorter time frames are more feasible.

Hill agrees that humanity has the tools needed to keep the virus in check. She says control and preventing a human plague are the two questions at this point. “And I think both of those are achievable goals.”

Hunter-gatherers sought out warmer climates during a millennia-long deep freeze. Plus, asteroid lost one million kilograms when it collided with the DART spacecraft, and how to stop bird flu becoming a pandemic.

The brain of the Dimorphos asteroid: a case study into anxiety and fear-induced attacks in wolves in the last cold age

The asteroid that was deliberately hit with a NASA telescope last year has lost over one million kilograms of rock but is now 33 minutes faster to complete its circle than it was before. An analysis of what happened when DART smashed into the Dimorphos asteroid shows how successful the test of planetary defence really was. The asteroid was hit close to the centre by the spacecraft and a spray of rubble flew outwards, which allowed the impact’s force to intensify.

Anxiety can cause the heart to race — and the reverse is also true, according to a study in mice. When researchers artificially raised the rodents’ heart rate, the animals became less willing to explore their environment, suggesting they were more anxious. The brain circuitry was switched off to make the mice less anxious. It is not clear if the same body– brain loop plays a part in acute fear or chronic anxiety, however the finding could have implications for treating anxiety in humans. Sarah Garfinkel says that if you want to understand fear, you have to look at the brain.

European hunter-gatherers holed up in Spain to escape the last ice age, when large parts of the world were covered with glaciers. Researchers analysed DNA from 356 individuals who lived in Europe and western Asia between 35,000 and 5,000 years ago. After the deep freeze ended, humans migrated back to Western Europe from the warmer climate on the Iberian Peninsula. 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 Change, the UN’s Panel on Climate Change and the Milk Crisis in India: The case of lumpy’s injuring cows

UK researchers are optimistic that they will get access to the European Union’s 95.5-billion (US$101 billion) Horizon Europe funding scheme, after a deal was reached to keep Northern Ireland in the EU. The United Kingdom will rejoin as an associate nation and give scientists the same level of financial access as before, though they won’t have any say in what research fields are prioritized in the next iteration. James Wilsdon says that the most difficult may be to rebuild the collaborating networks that have atrophied over the past few years.

When it comes to getting decision makers to pay attention to science, there are few better examples than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Yet there are no similar advisory bodies for other global challenges such as inequality or food security, and not for want of trying. The way the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change was founded can not be recreated, explains an editorial. Even though the world won’t see an assessment on the scale that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change pioneered, it is not the only way for policymakers to access scientific evidence.

In the year of 2015, millions of cows across India were stricken with a disease that causes rough skin, the first outbreak of the disease in the country. Climate change could be to blame for the emergence of the virus, which travels through flies. More than 150,000 cows died across India, half of them in the northern state of Rajasthan. The state’s milk production crashed by 21%, at the same time as resident farmers were struggling with failing crops. Rajasthan has seen a gradual increase in heavy rain days and average temperatures over the past few decades as the warm, humid climates support disease-carrying insects. It is difficult to say whether climate played a role or not in the cause of lumpy’s spread.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00631-y

Under-represented voices in undergraduate psychology reading material? A study by Sakshi Ghai, Lee de-wit, and Mak’s group “Audit”

Sakshi Ghai, Lee de-wit andYan Mak discovered that there were no voices from under-represented groups or regions in their undergraduate psychology reading material. To do a similar audit, the team has four suggestions: tailor the definition of diversity to your field, start by deconstructing the curriculum’s introductory courses, gather diversity data while remaining aware of its limits, and places people from minority ethnic groups at the heart of the audit.