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Today's Headlines: July 16, 2018

Global Health Security

Papua New Guinea to Start Polio Immunization Drive ( Outbreak News Today) Last month, a vaccine-derived poliovirus type 1 (VDPV1) case was confirmed in a child from Morobe Province. Papua New Guinea has not had a case of wild poliovirus since 1996, and the country was certified as polio-free in 2000. Starting tomorrow, a polio immunization campaign will kick off in Morobe, Madang and Eastern Highlands provinces of Papua New Guinea. Go to article

NTI Receives Grant to Create Global Health Security Index ( Homeland Preparedness News) Several organizations, including the Nuclear Threat Initiative biosecurity program, received a grant last week to create a Global Health Security Index. The GHS Index will assess countries' capabilities to prevent, detect, and respond to high consequence biological events. This index will rely on publicly available data and be measured by an independent entity. The first GHS Index is expected to be released in 2019. Go to article


Government Affairs & National Security

Drug to Treat Smallpox Approved by FDA, a Move Against Bioterrorism ( New York Times) The FDA on Friday approved the first drug intended to treat smallpox--a move that could halt a lethal pandemic if the virus were to be released as a terrorist bioweapon or through a laboratory accident. The antiviral pill, tecovirimat, also known as Tpoxx, has never been tested in humans with smallpox because the disease was declared eradicated in 1980, three years after the last known case. Go to article

See also: New Smallpox Antiviral Increases National Health Security ( ASPR Blog) In the 20th century alone, smallpox deaths worldwide numbered in the hundreds of millions. Roughly one-third of people infected with the disease died, while survivors were often left with permanent scars or blindness. After an aggressive global vaccination program in the mid-1970s, the WHO declared smallpox eradicated. But smallpox remains a health security threat in the 21st century. Fears that undeclared stocks of the smallpox virus might exist and that they could be used as weapons of bioterrorism spurred BARDA to fund the advanced research and development of antiviral drugs against smallpox. Go to article

Science Under Siege: Behind the Scenes at Trump's Troubled Environment Agency ( Nature) The day Donald Trump took office as US president, the mood was sombre at the main research campus of the EPA in Durham, North Carolina. As scientists arrived for work, they saw pictures of former president Barack Obama and the previous EPA administrator, Gina McCarthy, coming down off the walls. Researchers had reason to be anxious: Trump had threatened many times during his campaign to shutter the EPA, and he had already taken steps along that path. Go to article


Medicine & Public Health

Treatment and Outcomes in Children with Multidrug-Resistant Tuberculosis: A Systemic Review and Individual Patient Data Meta-Analysis ( PLOS: Medicine) An estimated 32,000 children develop multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB; Mycobacterium tuberculosis resistant to isoniazid and rifampin) each year. Little is known about the optimal treatment for these children. Go to article


Science & Technology

FDA Tries to Take the Reins on Regulating Cultured Meat ( Science) There may be a turf war on between two US federal agencies over who will regulate the emerging industry of cultured meat, but you wouldn't know it from the presentations by the FDA at a meeting here yesterday. In a daylong discussion of safety considerations, the agency asserted its jurisdiction over products made of chicken, beef, pork, and seafood cells grown in a culture medium, despite recent calls--including a proposal from lawmakers in the House of Representatives--to leave that responsibility to the USDA. Go to article

China Expands Surveillance of Sewage to Police Illegal Drug Use ( Nature) Dozens of cities across China are applying an unusual forensic technique to monitor illegal drug use: chemically analysing sewage for traces of drugs, or their telltale metabolites, excreted in urine. One southern city, Zhongshan, a drug hotspot, is also monitoring waste water to evaluate the effectiveness of its drug-reduction programmes, says Li Xiqing, an environmental chemist at Peking University in Beijing who is working with police in these cities. Go to article

Dual Route Vaccination for Plague with Emergency Use Applications ( Vaccine) Here, we report a dual-route vaccination approach for plague, able to induce a rapid response involving systemic and mucosal immunity, whilst also providing ease of use in those resource-poor settings most vulnerable to disease outbreaks. This novel vaccine (VypVaxDuo) comprises the recombinant F1 and V proteins in free association. Go to article

Potential DNA Damage from CRISPR Has Been 'Seriously Underestimated,' Study Finds ( STAT News) From the earliest days of the CRISPR-Cas9 era, scientists have known that the first step in how it edits genomes--snipping DNA--creates an unholy mess: Cellular repairmen frantically try to fix the cuts by throwing random chunks of DNA into the breach and deleting other random bits. Research published on Monday suggests that's only the tip of a Titanic-sized iceberg: CRISPR-Cas9 can cause significantly greater genetic havoc than experts thought, the study concludes, perhaps enough to threaten the health of patients who would one day receive CRISPR-based therapy. Go to article


21st Century Threats

Indicting 12 Russian Hackers Could Be Muller's Biggest Move Yet ( Wired) In some ways, special counsel Robert Mueller's indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers for their hacking and attack on the 2016 presidential election is Mueller's least surprising move yet--but it might also be his single most significant. Go to article

How Cape Town Got to the Brink of Water Catastrophe ( City Lab) This what a water panic looks like in a major global city. People hoard water. They queue for hours, well into the night, to fill jugs at natural springs. Like mad Christmas shoppers, they clear supermarkets of bottled water. They descend on stockers before they can fill the shelves. Go to article

How New York City is Tackling Extreme Heat in a Warming World ( Wired) On a hot summer day in New York City last July, Ajohntae Dixon was studying at home when he began struggling to breathe. With no air conditioning in his apartment, the temperature inside surged, and the 15-year-old's gasping quickly progressed into a full-blown asthma attack under the oppressive heat. He took his inhaler and then tried his nebulizer, but he was still fighting for air. Go to article

Killer Algorithms ( Project Syndicate) Academics sometimes say that the field of AI and machine learning is in its adolescence. If that's the case, it's an adolescent we've given the power to control our news, hire and fire people, and even kill them. Go to article


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