Egyptian officials are being unusually zealous in their battle for public health
EGYPTIANS blame their government for many things, but they cannot say it has failed to rise to the threat of swine flu. In May it ordered the mass slaughter of Egypt’s 200,000-odd pigs. Since the summer, masked health officials have screened the country’s airports, hauling some 800 feverish-looking visitors off to quarantine on arrival. In August the government banned anyone under 25 or over 60 from making the pilgrimage to Mecca, in a bid to keep the more vulnerable safe at home.
Read more... (The Economist)
Tuesday, 6 October 2009
Thursday, 17 September 2009
2009 World economic and social survey: Promoting the environment, saving the planet
A United Nations report recommends a new Marshall Plan of more than $500 billion per year, or one per cent of global output, to help developing countries ease the impact of global warming and adjust to its effects while continuing on a path of economic growth. For every rise of one degree in global temperature, the annual average growth in developing countries drops betweens two and three percentage points with little impact on advanced countries.
However, to satisfy development needs, energy demands will have to rise in developing countries, posing a challenge in how to combine the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions with economic objectives. The World Economic and Social Survey suggests that market solutions, including the development of a carbon market, through “cap and trade” mechanisms or taxation schemes in developed countries, are not the solution for developing countries. Rather, it recommends a combination of large-scale investments and active government policy interventions for developing countries.
Among the possible multilateral measures in support of a global investment programme set out in the report is the creation of a global clean energy fund, a global feed-in tariff regime in support of renewable energy sources, a climate technology programme and a more balanced intellectual property regime for aiding the transfer of clean energy technology. Currently, the financing needed to meet the climate challenge that is available to developing countries from bilateral and multilateral sources is estimated at about $21 billion. That amount will have to rise manifold, and sooner rather than later. This is a daunting challenge.
read more...
Wednesday, 1 July 2009
A new deal on climate change
Six months before the Copenhagen summit on climate change, the UK is calling for all countries to press for an ambitious deal that puts the needs of the world's poorest at its heart.
DFID is committing more resources than ever before to tackle climate change in the world's poorest countries. We want to see an agreement which takes action to limit global temperature increases, action to help developing countries adapt to climate change, and a deal which supports the transformation to a low-carbon economy worldwide.
Read our feature for an overview of why a new deal on climate change is so important for the world's poor, and for climate change case studies and facts
Or visit the Act on Copenhagen website, which sets out the government's ideas and commitments on climate change, and sign up to back the British bid at Copenhagen 2009.
Visit www.dfid.gov.uk for more information
Thursday, 18 June 2009
Swine Flu Science: First Wiki, Then Publish
Last month I scrambled to write a story about the evolution of swine flu for the New York Times. I talked to some of the top experts on the evolution of viruses who were, at that very moment, analyzing the genetic material in samples of the virus isolated around the world. One scientist, whom I reached at home, said, “Sure, I’ve got a little time. I’m just making some coffee while my computer crunches some swine flu. What’s up?”
All of the scientists were completely open with me. They didn’t wave me off because they had to wait until their results were published in a big journal. In fact, they were open with the whole world, posting all their results in real-time on a wiki. So everyone who wanted to peruse their analysis could see how it developed as more data emerged and as they used different methods to analyze it.
Now, a little over a month later, they’re publishing their results in the journal Nature. Normally we press folks would get a press release about the paper a week before publication, and it would be under strict embargo till it appeared in the journal. This morning, however, I got a press release pointing me to the published paper. And while Nature normally requires you to subscribe to read a paper, the flu paper is published under a Creative Commons license, which means anyone can get it and use it under the license’s terms.
Tuesday, 9 June 2009
Google Eyes New Philanthropy Tack as Charity Chief Resigns
The head of Google’s charity unit is stepping down to become the technology giant’s “chief philanthropy evangelist,” a move that could represent a shift from traditional grant making in the firm’s philanthropic approach, The New York Times reports.
Announcing the move on a company blog, Larry Brilliant signaled a greater emphasis on Google.org projects developed with company engineers, such as data-based efforts to track flu outbreaks or individual energy use.
While the unit has “been able to support some remarkable nonprofit organizations,” Mr. Brilliant wrote, “our greatest impact has come when we’ve attacked problems in ways that make the most of Google’s strengths in technology and information.”
Read about an interview with Mr. Brilliant that The Chronicle conducted when he first took the Google job.)
(Free registration is required to view the New York Times article, and a paid subscription or short-term pass is required to view the Chronicle article.)
Announcing the move on a company blog, Larry Brilliant signaled a greater emphasis on Google.org projects developed with company engineers, such as data-based efforts to track flu outbreaks or individual energy use.
While the unit has “been able to support some remarkable nonprofit organizations,” Mr. Brilliant wrote, “our greatest impact has come when we’ve attacked problems in ways that make the most of Google’s strengths in technology and information.”
Read about an interview with Mr. Brilliant that The Chronicle conducted when he first took the Google job.)
(Free registration is required to view the New York Times article, and a paid subscription or short-term pass is required to view the Chronicle article.)
Fears of a global rise in infectious conditions may be unfounded.
Nature
09 Apr 2009
Disease in a warming climate
Fears of a global rise in infectious conditions may be unfounded.
Lila Guterman
Climate change may lead diseases such as malaria to change their geographical ranges.WHO/TDR/S.Lindsay Climate change takes the blame for many dim future prospects: rising sea levels, more frequent droughts and disappearing glaciers, to name just a few. But perhaps the warming trend should be absolved of responsibility for a predicted bump in the global burden of infectious disease.
That's the bottom line of a paper in the April issue of the journal Ecology, which argues that the geographical ranges of infectious diseases are more likely to shift than to expand (K. D. Lafferty Ecology 90, 888–900; 2009). "You often see a list of the 12 terrible things that are going to happen with climate change, and increases in infectious diseases is often on that list," says Kevin Lafferty, an ecologist with the US Geological Survey in Santa Barbara, California. But data from diseases such as yellow fever and malaria, he says, provide "a different reality".
Five other papers in the same issue of the journal respond to Lafferty's work, with widely varying views. Sarah Randolph, a parasite ecologist at the University of Oxford, UK, agrees with Lafferty and says that focusing on climate change can distract scientists and public-health agencies from the actual reasons that infectious diseases spread.
But Mercedes Pascual, a disease ecologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, says that other causes are themselves often affected by climate change. To polarize the causes as climate versus anything else is, she says, "not helpful".
Gloomy predictions
Work in the mid- to late 1990s suggested that warming temperatures would prompt infectious diseases to sweep across the globe. For instance, a 1999 report by Britain's Royal Society called Climate Change and Human Health predicted that by 2020, the incidence of malaria would have risen by 60%. But ecologists now say that those studies were too simplistic, having failed to take into account the fact that even a large increase in temperature can result in a very small chance of disease in areas where disease transmission is very low.
Still, says Lafferty, the idea has been hard to shake. As the planet warms, insects and other disease carriers can move into higher latitudes and altitudes that were previously too cold. According to Lafferty, some of the warmer parts of the disease's current range may become too hot. Besides, the vectors may not find appropriate host animals in expanded ranges, because biodiversity tends to decline away from the tropics.
Critics charge that Lafferty's arguments are flawed. Most climate predictions suggest a greater rise in minimum temperatures, such as night-time or winter temperatures, than in maximum temperatures, points out Richard Ostfeld, an animal ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. Because of that, disease carriers may remain comfortable in their current ranges. Andrew Dobson, an infectious-disease ecologist at Princeton University in New Jersey, adds that the lower diversity of hosts in new ranges could actually pose a problem for humans because the vectors may choose to bite or sting humans and their livestock, rather than wild animals.
Besides, says Pascual, even if the range of a disease shifts rather than expands, the effect on human health is still likely to worsen dramatically. For instance, the high-altitude areas of Africa that are currently free of malaria have much larger populations than the low-lying malarious regions. People in the highlands are also less like to have acquired immunity, and so may be affected more by the disease. "It does matter if we get three million more cases in the highlands versus a much smaller contraction [of cases] somewhere else," she says.
Changing range
Paul Epstein, a doctor and public-health expert at Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment, says that people are likely to move in large numbers because of climate change, often increasing the population density in already-crowded areas such as Africa's highlands. The implications of shifting disease ranges, he says, are not that "everything balances out. There are much more profound impacts."
Scientists are also arguing over whether recent examples of rises in infectious disease can be pinned on climate change. Lafferty and Randolph say that agriculture, travel and shipping, drug and pesticide resistance, and other economic and social factors may all have a larger role than climate. "There is not a single case of upsurge or emergence of an infectious disease that can be shown to be due to climate change," Randolph says. She and Pascual have each studied increases in malaria in the East Africa highlands in the past few decades and come to opposing conclusions about whether the climate data mirror the disease rise.
The key to settling these questions, many scientists say, is finding long-term data sets that include information on both disease and climate. Because of ecosystem dynamics and the complexity of disease, generalizing over large regions will always be fraught. "What happens in one place may not specifically predict what's going to happen in another place," says David Relman, a microbiologist and infectious-disease specialist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who chaired a 2008 Institute of Medicine report Global Climate Change and Extreme Weather Events on similar topics. "These are really big unanswered questions. You'll find a lot of opinion, but we don't have a lot of data."
09 Apr 2009
Disease in a warming climate
Fears of a global rise in infectious conditions may be unfounded.
Lila Guterman
Climate change may lead diseases such as malaria to change their geographical ranges.WHO/TDR/S.Lindsay Climate change takes the blame for many dim future prospects: rising sea levels, more frequent droughts and disappearing glaciers, to name just a few. But perhaps the warming trend should be absolved of responsibility for a predicted bump in the global burden of infectious disease.
That's the bottom line of a paper in the April issue of the journal Ecology, which argues that the geographical ranges of infectious diseases are more likely to shift than to expand (K. D. Lafferty Ecology 90, 888–900; 2009). "You often see a list of the 12 terrible things that are going to happen with climate change, and increases in infectious diseases is often on that list," says Kevin Lafferty, an ecologist with the US Geological Survey in Santa Barbara, California. But data from diseases such as yellow fever and malaria, he says, provide "a different reality".
Five other papers in the same issue of the journal respond to Lafferty's work, with widely varying views. Sarah Randolph, a parasite ecologist at the University of Oxford, UK, agrees with Lafferty and says that focusing on climate change can distract scientists and public-health agencies from the actual reasons that infectious diseases spread.
But Mercedes Pascual, a disease ecologist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, says that other causes are themselves often affected by climate change. To polarize the causes as climate versus anything else is, she says, "not helpful".
Gloomy predictions
Work in the mid- to late 1990s suggested that warming temperatures would prompt infectious diseases to sweep across the globe. For instance, a 1999 report by Britain's Royal Society called Climate Change and Human Health predicted that by 2020, the incidence of malaria would have risen by 60%. But ecologists now say that those studies were too simplistic, having failed to take into account the fact that even a large increase in temperature can result in a very small chance of disease in areas where disease transmission is very low.
Still, says Lafferty, the idea has been hard to shake. As the planet warms, insects and other disease carriers can move into higher latitudes and altitudes that were previously too cold. According to Lafferty, some of the warmer parts of the disease's current range may become too hot. Besides, the vectors may not find appropriate host animals in expanded ranges, because biodiversity tends to decline away from the tropics.
Critics charge that Lafferty's arguments are flawed. Most climate predictions suggest a greater rise in minimum temperatures, such as night-time or winter temperatures, than in maximum temperatures, points out Richard Ostfeld, an animal ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. Because of that, disease carriers may remain comfortable in their current ranges. Andrew Dobson, an infectious-disease ecologist at Princeton University in New Jersey, adds that the lower diversity of hosts in new ranges could actually pose a problem for humans because the vectors may choose to bite or sting humans and their livestock, rather than wild animals.
Besides, says Pascual, even if the range of a disease shifts rather than expands, the effect on human health is still likely to worsen dramatically. For instance, the high-altitude areas of Africa that are currently free of malaria have much larger populations than the low-lying malarious regions. People in the highlands are also less like to have acquired immunity, and so may be affected more by the disease. "It does matter if we get three million more cases in the highlands versus a much smaller contraction [of cases] somewhere else," she says.
Changing range
Paul Epstein, a doctor and public-health expert at Harvard Medical School's Center for Health and the Global Environment, says that people are likely to move in large numbers because of climate change, often increasing the population density in already-crowded areas such as Africa's highlands. The implications of shifting disease ranges, he says, are not that "everything balances out. There are much more profound impacts."
Scientists are also arguing over whether recent examples of rises in infectious disease can be pinned on climate change. Lafferty and Randolph say that agriculture, travel and shipping, drug and pesticide resistance, and other economic and social factors may all have a larger role than climate. "There is not a single case of upsurge or emergence of an infectious disease that can be shown to be due to climate change," Randolph says. She and Pascual have each studied increases in malaria in the East Africa highlands in the past few decades and come to opposing conclusions about whether the climate data mirror the disease rise.
The key to settling these questions, many scientists say, is finding long-term data sets that include information on both disease and climate. Because of ecosystem dynamics and the complexity of disease, generalizing over large regions will always be fraught. "What happens in one place may not specifically predict what's going to happen in another place," says David Relman, a microbiologist and infectious-disease specialist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who chaired a 2008 Institute of Medicine report Global Climate Change and Extreme Weather Events on similar topics. "These are really big unanswered questions. You'll find a lot of opinion, but we don't have a lot of data."
Professor Anthony Costello: climate change biggest threat to humans
May 14, 2009
Professor Anthony Costello: climate change biggest threat to humans
Sam Lister, Health Editor
Climate change poses the biggest threat to human health in the 21st century but its full impact is not being grasped by the healthcare community or policymakers, a medical report concludes.
The report, compiled by a commission of academics from University College London and published in The Lancet, warns that climate change risks huge death tolls caused by disease, food and water shortages and poor sanitation.
The authors said that the NHS would face serious incremental pressures from heat and hygiene-related illnesses because of increasingly hot summers, greater pathogen spread with warmer temperatures, and the heightened risk of flooding.
Professor Anthony Costello, a paediatrician and director of UCL Institute for Global Health, said that he had not realised the full ramifications of climate change on health until 18 months ago.
Related Links
* Yes, we can solve the energy crisis
* Will climate change Bill blow Obama off course?
* Climate change remains agenda priority
Describing the threat as a "clear and present danger" that would affect billions of lives, he said that the world needed a 21st-century public health movement to deal with climate change. He added that failure to act will result in future generations feeling the same moral outrage as is felt today towards those "who brought in and did nothing to stop slavery".
"The big message of this report is that climate change is a health issue affecting billions of people, not just an environmental issue about polar bears and deforestation," Professor Costello, the commission leader, said. "The impacts will be felt not just in the UK, but all around the world — and not just in some distant future but in our lifetimes and those of our children."
The UCL Lancet Commission focused on six areas for their report, Managing the health effects of climate change: patterns of disease and mortality, food security, water and sanitation, shelter and human settlements, extreme events, and population migration.
The commission considered a number of ways that climate change could affect health. Changing patterns of disease and mortality would emerge in a greater rate of transmission and geographic spread of traditionally tropical endemic diseases such as malaria and dengue fever.
Heat will also have a serious effect on mortality, as will food and water security, with scientists predicting that crop yields could drop by 17 per cent with a 1C change in temperature.
Professor Costello said that the health lobby "had come to the issue late and should be saying more".
The commission said that there was the need for health leaders to join the debate on mitigation strategies — policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions to tackle climate change — and emphasise the importance of action. It added that there must be a focus on health systems, in particular the inequalities between developed and developing nations, and a drive by healthcare professionals to outline how adopting low-carbon lifestyles can improve human health, reducing obesity, heart and lung disease, diabetes and stress.
"We believe that all the main players — health, political, scientific, technological, and civil society must come together," Professor Costello said. "We have laid out a framework for action, and we have called for a collation of information on the health effects of climate change. We need a new 21st-century public health movement to deal with climate change."
An international team of researchers, led by Professor Sir Andrew Haines from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, is investigating the potential health benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The results of the study will inform the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December this year.
Professor Mark Maslin, director of UCL’s Environment Institute and a co-author, said that it should act as "Stern Report for Health and for medics", in reference to the economic review of climate change conducted by Sir Nicholas Stern.
Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, added: "This really hasn’t been an issue on the table for anyone in health over the last 10 years. They must take a leading part in this debate."
Professor Anthony Costello: climate change biggest threat to humans
Sam Lister, Health Editor
Climate change poses the biggest threat to human health in the 21st century but its full impact is not being grasped by the healthcare community or policymakers, a medical report concludes.
The report, compiled by a commission of academics from University College London and published in The Lancet, warns that climate change risks huge death tolls caused by disease, food and water shortages and poor sanitation.
The authors said that the NHS would face serious incremental pressures from heat and hygiene-related illnesses because of increasingly hot summers, greater pathogen spread with warmer temperatures, and the heightened risk of flooding.
Professor Anthony Costello, a paediatrician and director of UCL Institute for Global Health, said that he had not realised the full ramifications of climate change on health until 18 months ago.
Related Links
* Yes, we can solve the energy crisis
* Will climate change Bill blow Obama off course?
* Climate change remains agenda priority
Describing the threat as a "clear and present danger" that would affect billions of lives, he said that the world needed a 21st-century public health movement to deal with climate change. He added that failure to act will result in future generations feeling the same moral outrage as is felt today towards those "who brought in and did nothing to stop slavery".
"The big message of this report is that climate change is a health issue affecting billions of people, not just an environmental issue about polar bears and deforestation," Professor Costello, the commission leader, said. "The impacts will be felt not just in the UK, but all around the world — and not just in some distant future but in our lifetimes and those of our children."
The UCL Lancet Commission focused on six areas for their report, Managing the health effects of climate change: patterns of disease and mortality, food security, water and sanitation, shelter and human settlements, extreme events, and population migration.
The commission considered a number of ways that climate change could affect health. Changing patterns of disease and mortality would emerge in a greater rate of transmission and geographic spread of traditionally tropical endemic diseases such as malaria and dengue fever.
Heat will also have a serious effect on mortality, as will food and water security, with scientists predicting that crop yields could drop by 17 per cent with a 1C change in temperature.
Professor Costello said that the health lobby "had come to the issue late and should be saying more".
The commission said that there was the need for health leaders to join the debate on mitigation strategies — policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions to tackle climate change — and emphasise the importance of action. It added that there must be a focus on health systems, in particular the inequalities between developed and developing nations, and a drive by healthcare professionals to outline how adopting low-carbon lifestyles can improve human health, reducing obesity, heart and lung disease, diabetes and stress.
"We believe that all the main players — health, political, scientific, technological, and civil society must come together," Professor Costello said. "We have laid out a framework for action, and we have called for a collation of information on the health effects of climate change. We need a new 21st-century public health movement to deal with climate change."
An international team of researchers, led by Professor Sir Andrew Haines from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, is investigating the potential health benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The results of the study will inform the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December this year.
Professor Mark Maslin, director of UCL’s Environment Institute and a co-author, said that it should act as "Stern Report for Health and for medics", in reference to the economic review of climate change conducted by Sir Nicholas Stern.
Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, added: "This really hasn’t been an issue on the table for anyone in health over the last 10 years. They must take a leading part in this debate."
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