Month: January 2018

The World Health Organization warns that children in Yemen are dying as diphtheria, a preventable disease, spreads rapidly throughout the country.

Forty-six of the more than 470 people with clinically diagnosed diphtheria in Yemen — or nearly 10 percent — have died in less than four months, according to WHO.

“Diphtheria is a highly infectious but vaccine-preventable disease,” WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic said.  “It can be treated with antitoxins and antibiotics, both of which are in short supply in Yemen. The diphtheria vaccine is normally administered as a part of routine immunization programs for children around the world.

“The rapid spread of diphtheria in Yemen highlights major gaps in routine vaccination and also means the health system is under severe strain.” 

Sixty-eight percent of suspected diphtheria cases are children under 15 years old, Jasarevic said.

WHO has deployed Rapid Response Teams throughout affected parts of the country to ensure proper case detection, contact tracing and follow up, as well as health education.

WHO has delivered $200,000 worth of antibiotics and 1,000 vials of diphtheria antitoxins, Jasarevic said. The medication can help stop the spread of the bacterium to vital organs in patients already infected with diphtheria.

However, prevention remains the best way to contain the spread of the disease. In preparation for a nationwide immunization campaign, the U.N. children’s fund imported 5.5 million doses of anti-diphtheria vaccines into the country December 20.

The final decision on when the campaign will kick off rests with Yemeni health authorities, who have not yet given the go-ahead.
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People walking outdoors with masks are an increasingly common sight in the capital of India, where the toxic air, which ranks among the world’s dirtiest, has rung alarm bells. Now a team of innovators from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, is offering another solution: a tiny respiratory filter that can be stuck in the nose to restrict particulate matter from entering the body without hampering breathing.

The project involved creating a thin, flexible membrane which blocks out most dust and air pollutants, including concentrations of the deadly PM 2.5, the tiny particulate matter which doctors say causes maximum damage to lungs.

The innovation, called Nasofilters, won the Indian president’s “National Startups Award” last May and was featured in South Korea’s 2017 list of “Top 50 technical startups in the world.”

The idea of nasal filters is not new, and some are available in Western countries to help reduce exposure to allergens such as pollen. One study conducted in 2016 on a product made in Denmark found it reduced symptoms of allergies and was comfortable to use.

The Indian device, however, focuses on the country’s pressing problem of air pollutants. Working out of one room on the sprawling IIT campus, which has been the home of several innovations, the young team is optimistic it will find acceptance in a city where the toxic cocktail of vehicle fumes, construction dust and burning waste spikes to as much as 30 times the safe limit in winter.

Shaped roughly like a fingernail, the dark brown membrane is made by assembling millions of small-sized pores and resembles a fine, porous cloth.

The costs have been held down to ensure the filter is within the reach of most people: It is priced at approximately 16 cents. Effective for around eight hours, the innovators claim it can filter out 95 percent of the pollutants.

Origins of the invention

Prateek Sharma started working on the idea along with some faculty members and others when he enrolled at IIT for engineering studies. The inspiration: His mother suffered from asthma.

“The initiation of this story was about a decade back. I always noticed my mother is wearing some kind of cloth on her face. That has always annoyed me,” said Sharma, the 25-year-old who now heads the startup which produces the filters, Nanoclean Global Private Ltd. 

Noticing she refused to wear a mask when she went outside, he set out to search for another solution.

“The problem is mega, the product is nano,” said Sharma, pointing to the filters. “It’s comfortable to wear, it is aesthetically not bothering them like a face mask which covers half of your face. There is a problem — I can’t even eat, can’t even talk to you while putting on a face mask.”

Growing curiosity

Reports of the product in Indian media have piqued curiosity in the city.

Ashok Joshi, a retired senior army officer who lives in Delhi, made the trip to IIT with his wife to find out more about the filters and pick them up after reading reports about it in newspapers.

“We are outdoor people by and large, being in the army, mostly I am outdoors,” he said. “If something is there, which does not look very ugly and you can wear it comfortably, excellent idea. Why not?”

On days when air pollution is categorized as severe, doctors advise people, especially children and the elderly, against outdoor activities. On New Year’s Day, New Delhi’s air pollution levels bordered on severe.

The nose filter’s real test lies in winning acceptance from people like Joshi as they try it out in the weeks and months ahead.

While the invention, if it proves acceptable to consumers, may help people protect themselves from the dirty air, environmental activists stress that the pressing need is to address the causes of the air pollution: the city’s huge vehicle fleet and smoke from fires.

India’s air pollution crisis is not restricted to New Delhi — nine other Indian cities figure among the WHO’s list of the world’s 20 most polluted cities.
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America’s space agency wants you to head for the mountains with a smartphone and a measuring stick.

NASA’s earth science arm is funding research that recruits citizen scientists on skis, snowshoes and snowmobiles to measure the depth of snow in backcountry locations in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.

Their measurements will be incorporated into computer models that calculate how much water will end up in the region’s rivers and reservoirs.

​Early results promising

“Our initial model runs show that citizen science measurements are doing an amazing job of improving our simulations,” said David Hill, an Oregon State University professor of civil engineering, who is collaborating with Alaska and University of Washington researchers. They received one of 16 NASA citizen science grants for the project.

The snowpack measurements are incorporated into computer models estimating “snow-water equivalent,” the amount of liquid water contained in snow cover, of a watershed. 

In Western states, according to NASA, nearly three-fourths of annual stream flow that provides drinking water comes from spring and summer melt.

NASA in February began a multiyear research project to improve the accuracy of its snow measurements with partners in Europe and Canada, trying to solve challenges such as detecting snow through trees. 

​Several projects

The grant awarded to Hill, Anthony Arendt of the University of Washington and Gabriel Wolken, a research geologist with the Alaska Division of Geological & Geophysical Surveys, is not directly connected to that project but has a mutual interest, said Kevin Murphy, a program executive for science data systems at NASA headquarters. 

“We decided about two years ago to start this program, which really looks at how can we harness the creativity and the capabilities of citizens to augment a lot of our satellite or aircraft measurements,” Murphy said.

Cheap, plentiful volunteers

Snow telemetry stations maintained by the U.S. Agriculture Department are another important tool for measuring snow in high-elevation and other hard-to-access places, Hill said. The unmanned stations collect data using a system of automated sensors. 

But too few of them exist, Hill said. “They’re expensive to install, they’re expensive to maintain, so there just aren’t that many.”

The citizen snow-measuring program, Community Snow Observations, aims to supplement that with people. 

“We want to turn the public into these mobile snow telemetry stations,” he said. “You just need a probe to do it.”

The measuring device can be as rudimentary as a yardstick, Hill said, but most people venturing into mountains already carry an avalanche probe, a 5- to 6-meter stick that folds down like a tent pole. After an avalanche, the probes are used to feel for people buried in the snow. Probes typically carry measurement markings.

“You want to know when you actually find that person how deep they are,” Hill said. “They’re really just a big, long ruler.”

First volunteers in Alaska

For the citizen science program, an online tutorial tells participants to find undisturbed snow, push the probe firmly to the ground, read the depth in centimeters and enter the data onto a smartphone app. Participants are asked to repeat that several times and average the measurements.

The app records the location and time of the measurement and uploads the information. The program accounts for measurements in continental climate locations with light, dry snow or the wet, dense snow of maritime climates. 

Initial measurements were made last winter in Alaska’s Thompson Pass north of Valdez, where other snow research was being conducted.

“I recruited some of the folks from Valdez Avalanche Center. They brought friends along,” said Wolken, the Alaska research geologist. “That was our first go at getting sort of a grassroots, citizen science team.”

The hundreds of measurements collected far outpaced what the scientists could gather themselves. When NASA announced grants for citizen scientist projects, the researchers jumped to apply, Wolken said.

Modeling errors plunge

Preliminary calculations have been “striking,” Hill said, and the subject of a paper written by a doctoral student.

“He has results that basically show that the errors in our modeled snow-water equivalent are cut by about 90 percent with this input from public,” Hill said. “We’re thrilled about that.”

Other NASA grants in the program will use citizen scientists to collect data on mosquito populations and their breeding environments around the world, water depths in lakes in North Carolina and elsewhere, moisture in soil at various locations, changes in giant kelp across the globe, and images of clouds from the ground in Colorado.
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A life threatening cold front swept across North America, bringing piles of snow and icy conditions. The National Weather Service issued wind chill advisories and freeze warnings covering a vast area from South Texas to Canada and from Montana through New England. VOA’s Carol Pearson reports doctors are issuing warnings about injuries from frostbite and ice.
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A major outbreak of coral-eating crown-of-thorns starfish has been found munching Australia’s world heritage-listed Great Barrier Reef, scientists said Friday, prompting the government to begin culling the spiky marine animals.

The predator starfish feeds on corals by spreading its stomach over them and using digestive enzymes to liquefy tissue, and the outbreak hits as the reef is still reeling from two consecutive years of major coral bleaching.

“Each starfish eats about its body diameter a night, and so over time that mounts up very significantly,” Hugh Sweatman, a senior research scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science, told Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) radio.

“A lot of coral will be lost,” he said.

That would be a blow for both the ecosystem and the lucrative tourism industry which it supports.

The crown-of-thorns starfish were found in plague proportions last month in the Swains Reefs, at the southern edge of the Great Barrier Reef, by researchers from the reef’s Marine Park Authority, a spokeswoman for the authority told Reuters by phone.

The remote reefs, about 200 km (120 miles) offshore from Yeppoon, a holiday and fishing town some 500 km north of Queensland state capital, Brisbane, are well south of the most-visited sections of the Great Barrier Reef, where most culling efforts are focused.

But the government’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority already killed some starfish at Swains Reefs in December and will mount another mission this month, a director at the authority, Fred Nucifora, told the ABC.

“The complexity with the Swains Reef location is … they are logistically difficult to access and it is actually quite a hostile environment to work in,” Nucifora said.

Previous outbreaks

There have been four major crown-of-thorns outbreaks since the 1960s in the Great Barrier Reef, but it recovered each time because there were always healthy populations of herbivorous fish. The outbreaks are usually triggered by extra nutrients in the water but the reason for the current outbreak was unclear, Sweatman said.

The reef is still recovering from damage wrought by the worst-ever coral bleaching on record, which in 2016 killed two-thirds of a 700 km stretch of reef.

On Friday, a report published in the journal Science found that high ocean temperatures are harming tropical corals much more often than a generation ago, putting reefs under pressure.

The Great Barrier Reef, covering 348,000 square kilometers, was World Heritage listed in 1981 as the most extensive and spectacular coral reef ecosystem on the planet, according to the UNESCO website.
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A new study has found that anti-tuberculosis drugs killed more bacteria in laboratory mice given a vitamin C supplement than those given drugs alone.

If the findings hold up in human studies, the authors say, the result could be that there’s a cheap, safe way to reduce the months-long treatment time for one of the world’s leading killers. Also, the vitamin supplement could offer a way to cut down on the development of drug-resistant TB, a serious health threat.

Tuberculosis is one of the leading causes of death worldwide. According to the World Health Organization, 1.7 million people died of the disease last year. Of more than 10 million new infections, about 600,000 were resistant to the leading drug. 

Front-line drugs attack TB cells as they multiply, but a small proportion of the bacteria survive by going dormant. If therapy stops too soon, these “persisters” start multiplying and the patient relapses, often with strains that are resistant to the drugs.

Current TB treatment takes six months, largely to outlast the persisters. But it’s hard for patients to stay on treatment for so long.

Accidental discovery

Albert Einstein College of Medicine microbiologist William Jacobs and colleagues previously discovered by accident that antioxidants like vitamin C stopped TB bacteria in a test tube from becoming persisters.

“When we first discovered it, it was like, ‘Wow! There’s just so much we don’t know yet. And wouldn’t that be really cool if it really works,’ ” Jacobs said.

The study in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy said Jacobs and colleagues found that TB-infected mice treated with two standard drugs plus a high dose of vitamin C had roughly tenfold fewer bacteria in their lungs after several weeks than mice treated with drugs alone.

“It’s not sterilization yet,” he added, “but it’s heading in that direction.”

But will it work in people?

“The bottom line is that we don’t know the answer,” Jacobs acknowledged. “But I think what this study suggests is we should really go and [find out].”

Other experts not connected to the study agreed.

Even though there has been very little research on vitamin C and tuberculosis, the nutrient is “a safe compound, it’s widely available, it’s inexpensive,” noted David Alland, associate dean of clinical research at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. “I think that when we have those kinds of options to look at, we should look at them without having to spend decades trying to figure out exactly how they work.”

And if it does work, he added, “you’d get a big bang for your buck.”
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