Today's Headlines: March 20, 2018
Biological Agents & Infectious Diseases
Nigeria Faces Mystifying Spike in Deadly Lassa Fever (
NPR Goats and Soda) It's the worst Lassa fever outbreak ever recorded in Nigeria, according to the WHO. "In January alone there were more cases [203 suspected cases] than during the whole year 2017 combined," says Lorenzo Pomarico, emergency coordinator for the medical group ALIMA, the Alliance for International Medical Action. "This is an extraordinary and unprecedented outbreak in its sheer scale."
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Uganda Cholera Outbreak Slows, but Violence in DRC Complicates Recovery (
Devex) There has been an 80 percent decrease in the number of new cholera cases reported among a community of Congolese refugees in Uganda's western Lake Albert region, the World Health Organization told Devex Friday. As recently as Feb. 28, health care workers were identifying roughly 100 new cases a day and as of March 12, that number is down to 20.
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Domestic Preparedness & Response
Returning to Vieques (
New York Times) Slammed in September by Hurricanes Irma and Maria, this lush, wild bit of Puerto Rico, eight miles east of the main island, is still recovering. Winds that howled at well over 100 miles an hour hurled roofs, cars and boats, denuded trees and smashed windows. Pounding rains poured through ceilings. For weeks there was no water. For much longer, no electricity. Nearly six months later, Vieques, population about 9,000, is welcoming visitors again.
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As Storms Get Stronger, Building Codes Are Getting Weaker (
Bloomberg Politics) The showdown in the Florida statehouse last year had all the drama of a knock-down political brawl: Powerful industries clashing. Warnings of death and destruction. And a surprise last-minute vote, delivering a sweeping reform bill to the governor's desk. The battle wasn't about gun control, immigration or healthcare, but about making it easier to ignore national guidelines on building codes.
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See also:
Rating the States 2018 (
Insurance Institute for Business & Home Safety) IBHS has released a new edition of the Institute's Rating the States report. In continuity with prior reports published in 2012 and 2015, Rating the States 2018 assesses the progress of 18 hurricane-prone coastal states along the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Coast in strengthening their residential building codes.
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Severe Storms, Tornadoes, Rip Through US Southeast (
NPR the two-way) An outbreak of severe storms, including several tornadoes erupted in a multi-state swath from Tennessee to Florida late Monday, leaving behind downed trees, power outages and numerous damaged structures, including on the campus of Jacksonville State University.
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Global Health & Security
Q&A: How to Build a New Health Humanitarian Workforce (
Devex) Just as the scale of health care needs in crisis contexts is surging, humanitarian groups are fighting their own battle for the human resources to respond. Organizations providing health services in the midst of humanitarian crisis are under enormous pressure. Increased displacement, a dwindling health workforce, attacks on health facilities, and tighter regulatory requirements have combined to create an extremely challenging working environment.
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Medicine & Public Health
The Struggle to Build a Massive 'Biobank' of Patient Data (
New York Times) This spring, the National Institutes of Health will start recruiting participants for one of the most ambitious medical projects ever envisioned. The goal is to find one million people in the US, from all walks of life and all racial and ethnic groups, who are willing to have their genomes sequenced, and to provide their medical records and regular blood samples.
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FDA, Industry Ponder Changes to Clinical Trials for Rare Disease Treatments (
STAT Plus - Subscription Required) Food and Drug Administration statisticians pondered changing how the agency uses statistics to approve drugs for rare disease at a public workshop Monday. The challenge, regulators said, is that there are so few patients who suffer from certain rare diseases that it might not be possible or feasible to do many rounds of traditional clinical trials.
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When Towns Lose Their Newspapers, Disease Detectives Are Left Flying Blind (
STAT) Maia Majumder was on Twitter earlier this month when she saw a map that terrified her. The map recorded the number of local newspapers in each county across the US. Large swaths were shaded light pink, denoting a county that had no local newspaper at all. As a record of the decline of the American newspaper industry, it was disconcerting.
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Science & Technology
Machine Learning Spots Treasure Trove of Elusive Viruses (
Nature) Researchers have used artificial intelligence to discover nearly 6,000 previously unknown species of virus. The work, presented on 15 March at a meeting organized by the US Department of Energy, illustrates an emerging tool for exploring the enormous, largely unknown diversity of viruses on Earth.
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Many Common Drugs, Not Just Antibiotics, May Kill off Gut Microbes (
STAT) Antibiotics, it's widely known, can wipe out a person's "good" microbes along with the bad - sometimes leading to nasty side effects like diarrhea or serious infections. But new research finds that antibiotics aren't alone in their bacterial slaughter: Nearly 1 in 4 other prescription medications, from antipsychotics to antivirals, kill off gut microbes. That could mean old drugs could have new uses - or have hidden impacts on antibiotic resistance.
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Extensive Impact of Non-antibiotic Drugs on Human Gut Bacteria (
Nature) A few commonly used non-antibiotic drugs have recently been associated with changes in gut microbiome composition, but the extent of this phenomenon is unknown. Here, we screened more than 1,000 marketed drugs against 40 representative gut bacterial strains, and found that 24% of the drugs with human targets, including members of all therapeutic classes, inhibited the growth of at least one strain
in vitro.
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Nonhuman Primate Models of Human Viral Infections (
Nature Reviews Immunology) Humans have a close phylogenetic relationship with nonhuman primates and share many physiological parallels, such as highly similar immune systems, with them. Importantly, NHPs can be infected with many human or related simian viruses. In many cases, viruses replicate in the same cell types as in humans, and infections are often associated with the same pathologies.
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21st Century Threats
Water Shortages Could Affect 5bn People by 2050, UN Report Warns (
The Guardian) More than 5 billion people could suffer water shortages by 2050 due to climate change, increased demand and polluted supplies, according to a UN report on the state of the world's water. The comprehensive annual study warns of conflict and civilisational threats unless actions are taken to reduce the stress on rivers, lakes, aquifers, wetlands and reservoirs.
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