Biological Agents & Infectious Diseases
WHO EMRO: 698,371 Cholera Cases in Yemen as of September 19 (
H5N1) After a pause of several days, WHO EMRO has posted a batch of Yemen cholera updates. According to its Daily Epidemiological Update for September 19, the totals are now 698,371 cases and 2,101 deaths since the outbreak began on April 27. That's an increase of 5,557 cases and 10 deaths since September 18.
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Domestic Preparedness & Response
When Irma Arrived, Most Florida Health Care Facilities Were Ready (
NPR: Shots) Another hurricane, another health care horror story. At least that's how it looked when eight patients died at a nursing home in Hollywood, Florida. The facility lost its air conditioning several days after Hurricane Irma struckThat event conjured memories of the scores of elderly who died in Louisiana hospitals and nursing homes following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. But it would be misleading to attribute the Florida deaths primarily to Irma. And it would be a mistake to assume that most other health care facilities in southern Florida were unprepared for a hurricane.
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Government Affairs & National Security
'Mystery After Mystery': Potent 'Health Attacks' on US Diplomats in Cuba Baffle Experts (
STAT) The blaring, grinding noise jolted the American diplomat from his bed in a Havana hotel. He moved just a few feet, and there was silence. He climbed back into bed. Inexplicably, the agonizing sound hit him again. It was as if he'd walked through some invisible wall cutting straight through his room. Soon came the hearing loss, and the speech problems, symptoms both similar and altogether different from others among at least 21 US victims in an astonishing international mystery still unfolding in Cuba. The top US diplomat has called them "health attacks."
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Global Health Security
The World Is Running out of Antibiotics, WHO Report Confirms (
WHO) The report - "Antibacterial agents in clinical development - an analysis of the antibacterial clinical development pipeline, including Mycobacterium tuberculosis" - shows a serious lack of new antibiotics under development to combat the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance. Most of the drugs currently in the clinical pipeline are modifications of existing classes of antibiotics and are only short-term solutions.
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Medicine & Public Health
Flu Is bad...in Many Ways... (
Virology Down Under) A Mum gives birth to a baby but she is too ill with influenza to know it. As we read another tragic story of the severe impact from disease (in some cases, death) related to Australian influenza (Flu) virus infections this season, we should be reminded just how serious the Flu can be.
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Science & Technology
A Vital Sugar Code for Ricin Toxicity (
Nature: Cell Research) Ricin is one of the most feared bioweapons in the world due to its extreme toxicity and easy access. Since no antidote exists, it is of paramount importance to identify the pathways underlying ricin toxicity.
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Identifying Structural Variants Using Linked-read Sequencing Data (
bioRxiv) Structural variation, including large deletions, duplications, inversions, translocations, and other rearrangements, is common in human and cancer genomes. A number of methods have been developed to identify structural variants from Illumina short-read sequencing data. However, reliable identification of structural variants remains challenging because many variants have breakpoints in repetitive regions of the genome and thus are difficult to identify with short reads. The recently developed linked-read sequencing technology from 10X Genomics combines a novel barcoding strategy with Illumina sequencing.
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Genetic Engineering Holds the Power to Save Humanity or Kill It (
MIT Technology Review) How likely is it that humanity will destroy itself? Various scientists have studied this probability, and the basic calculation is straightforward. The key parameters are the number of people capable of destroying the planet and the likelihood that they will do so. This likelihood has been hard to measure, since it depends on the psychological stability of the commanders in charge--how likely are they to trigger a nightmare scenario?
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See also:
Biotechnology and the Lifetime of Technical Civilizations (
Cornell University Library) The number of people able to end Earth's technical civilization has heretofore been small. Emerging dual-use technologies, such as biotechnology, may give similar power to thousands or millions of individuals. To quantitatively investigate the ramifications of such a marked shift on the survival of both terrestrial and extraterrestrial technical civilizations, this paper presents a two-parameter model for civilizational lifespans, i.e. the quantity
L in Drake's equation for the number of communicating extraterrestrial civilizations. One parameter characterizes the population lethality of a civilization's biotechnology and the other characterizes the civilization's psychosociology.
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Other 21st Century Threats
Silent Killer: Sweltering Planet Braces for Deadly Heat Shocks (
Thomson Reuters Foundation News) When Hurricane Harvey blasted ashore in August, drowning south Texas in a year's worth of rain in just a few days, it left behind an estimated $150 billion in damage to sodden homes and inundated factories, and claimed about 60 lives. Two weeks later, Hurricane Irma churned into Florida, killing at least 33 people there and causing billions more in damages - as well as brutal loss of life in the Caribbean. But these storms may not be 2017's deadliest US disaster. Instead, that title may go to a largely unseen killer: rising temperatures.
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Hurricanes Are Menacing Our Economy. We Have to Invest in Better Prediction. (
Washington Post) When a deadly hurricane last plowed directly into downtown Miami, back in 1926, the city had fewer than 100,000 people. Today the Miami metropolitan area is home to more than 6 million. This kind of explosive population growth, and the associated trillion-dollar development along our coasts, make it critical for the US to further improve forecasts of hurricanes and their deadly combination of storm surges, flash floods, and tornadoes.
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