which in April enlisted health and agriculture specialist Rajiv Shah as the department's first chief scientist.
The National institutes of health got $10 billion the National Science Foundation got $3 billion and agriculture got zip,
At issue is a set of apparently conflicting assessments of the chemical's health hazard. In 2007, the EPA concluded that health standards could be met by proper use of masks and procedures,
such as keeping workers away from newly fumigated fields. A 2009 report from the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR
however, concludes that methyl iodide fumigation results in significant health risks for workers and the general population,
says chemist Susan Kegley of the California-based Pesticide Action Network North america. But methyl iodide is by some measures four times as toxic as methyl bromide,
she notes. The EPA approved methyl iodide in October 2007, prompting protest at the time including from a group of chemists familiar with the toxic properties of the chemical in the lab
. I have read enough papers with cautions around the use of the chemical that it made
says Roald Hoffmann, a Nobel-prize-winning chemist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New york, who protested the federal approval of methyl iodide.
headed by chemist John Froines, before making a decision. Froines expects the process to take weeks.
our understanding is that there have been no reports of adverse health effects. Another difference between the two reports lies in how the safe exposure levels were calculated.
The California DPR report divided this by an extra factor of 10 to account for health unknowns,
It's really getting to a systems-level understanding of the mountain pine beetle epidemic, says study co-author JÃ rg Bohlmann, a chemical ecologist at the University of British columbia in Vancouver, Canada,
which stops the production of a protective toxic resin released by the tree and allows the beetles to continue to infest.
Multi-species genomic interactions have been studied for some human diseases, including malaria, and a few symbiotic ecological relationships such as leaf-cutter ants and their microbial partners,
but the approach has never before been applied on this scale for an outbreaking forest nuisance.
The researchers are now testing this strain to tease that apart. But the full utility of the fungus genome might only be realized after other related species are sequenced also,
EPA administrator Lisa Jackson said the move marks a significant advance in our work to protect health in the environment and move our nation into the sustainable, energy-efficient economy of the future.
EPA administrator Lisa Jackson took the first step in April with an endangerment finding that would formally declare carbon dioxide a danger to public health and the environment.
The pathogen has learned to live with these transposable elements, which could be a problem for it
In the arms race between plant and pathogen, potatoes have had long an ally: human plant breeders, who have struggled to develop blight-resistant spuds.
plant pathologists will be working flat out on new strategies for breeders based on how the blight operates and its potential weaknesses.
With all this knowledge about how the pathogen attacks the host on the biochemical level,
I would hope that some clever plant pathologist would be able to genetically engineer resistance.
The US Environmental protection agency (EPA) has agreed to set new rules governing emissions of mercury and other toxic chemicals from power plants by November 2011,
according to a settlement in a federal lawsuit filed by several environmental and health groups. Environmentalists say that the Clean Air Act required the EPA to set limits by 2002,
Vaccine report: More children than ever are being immunized, but 24 million infants in the world's poorest nations still do not receive routine immunization, according to a report by the World health organization, UNICEF and the World bank.
The 21 october State of the World's Vaccines and Immunization report says that although four in five children now have access to lifesaving vaccines,
at least another US$1 billion is needed annually to help raise immunization rates above 90%.%This would cover the rising costs of immunization
But researchers say that past landrace contaminations from illegal GM maize planting (see Nature 456,149;
HIV vaccine doubt: Results of the largest-ever HIV-vaccine trial looked less impressive when full details were published formally last week (S. Rerks-Ngarm et al.
N. Engl. J. Med. doi: 10.1056/nejmoa0908492; 2009) than when they were outlined in a press release a month earlier.
In September, the trial was said to show that a vaccine combination reduced the risk of HIV infection by nearly one-third.
But Peter Smith, a tropical epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, says there is not much evidence from the data that it protects at all.
The week ahead 29 october â oe1 November Philadelphia hosts the 47th Annual Meeting of the Infectious diseases Society of America. go. nature. com/ykfvnw 29 â oe30 October
Kenya, hosts the Multilateral Initiative on Malaria's fifth Pan-African Malaria Conference. www. mimalaria. org/pamc 2 â oe6 November The United nations Framework
and caused the plants to produce a protein inducing resistance to the antibiotic kanamycin. However, an expert committee dismissed these concerns,
The US Environmental protection agency (EPA) laid out White house-backed principles for a radical reform of US legislation regulating toxic chemicals, at present controlled by the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act.
and for chemical manufacturers routinely to give the agency toxicity data. The American Chemistry Council,
The US government should grade microorganisms and toxins according to their risk as potential biothreat agents,
That was the recommendation of a National Research Council report released last week, entitled Responsible Research with Biological Select Agents and Toxins.
Currently, research on 82 human, plant and animal pathogens (called select agents) is monitored under a 1996 law that requires the same security procedures for all of them.
The company revealed in April that data supporting a prenatal screen for Down's syndrome were mishandled and could not be relied on (see Nature 459,23;
If companies such as Germany's Bayer Materialscience, headquartered in Leverkusen, and Tokyo-based Showa Denko follow through with similar plans,
US President Barack Obama visited the National institutes of health in Bethesda, Maryland, on 30 september (pictured. Obama toured a National Cancer Institute lab,
where he was treated to video images of healthy and cancer-riddled brains, and praised the research made possible by the agency's spending of $5 billion out of the $10. 4 billion it got in economic stimulus funds.
The agency had raced to disburse the money by that same day, the end of the government's fiscal year.
Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider and Jack Szostak shared the 2009 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine,
Francis Collins, the newly minted director of the US National institutes of health, tells Nature how he feels about trying to ensure that the agency won't suffer financially
That began earlier this year with a proposed finding that carbon dioxide endangers human health and the environment,
provide the first direct link between dirty living, immune health and genetic expression. They also indicate that manipulating gut bacteria early in life might reduce allergies
and other autoimmune diseases, says Denise Kelly, a gut immunologist at the University of Aberdeen, UK and one of the study's authors.
Researchers began with 54 piglets and divided them equally between an outdoor environment, an indoor environment,
and an isolated environment where they were fed antibiotics on a daily basis. The scientists then killed piglets on days 5 (neonatal stage), 28 (weaning age),
for their health-promoting effects, and for their ability to limit intestinal pathogens such as Escherichia coli and Salmonella.
In contrast, the Firmicutes bacteria made up less than 70%and just more than 50%of the gut flora in indoor and isolated bred pigs respectively.
Animals raised in the isolated environment expressed more genes involved in inflammatory immune responses and cholesterol synthesis,
the link between living environment and immune response had been circumstantial. There has been a lot of hearsay around gut microbiota
and how it influences immune function and susceptibility to diseases and allergies, she says. The latest work establishes a strong causal link.
a food microbiologist at the University of Reading, UK, agrees that previous studies have shown by implication that immune responses are linked to organisms in the gut.
she hopes to further identify the types of organisms that are associated with health.
Plans for cutting emissions could also benefit health: Nature Newsmany strategies for reining in greenhouse gases come with substantial health benefits, according to a new study.
But the actions with the most dramatic impact on greenhouse gases aren't necessarily the biggest winners for health.
Twelve days before the United nations climate summit kicks off in Copenhagen, an international task force has published five research papers exploring the impact that strategies for tackling greenhouse gas emissions would have on public health.
Public health leaders from around the world weighed in on today's announcement, including United nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon, World health organization director-general Margaret Chan,
US secretary for the Department of health and human services Kathleen Sebelius and UK secretary of state for health Andy Burnham. Policies for mitigating the impact of climate change must align with policies for protecting public health,
says Chan. The findings released today can guide the assessment of alternatives for mitigation and motivate wise choices.
The reports were published in The Lancet1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The team, led by epidemiologist Andrew Haines at the London School of Hygiene
and Tropical Medicine, modelled a number of scenarios for reducing greenhouse gases. For each case study, the authors calculated the reductions of disability-adjusted life-years (DALYS
a measure of potential years of life lost to disease or premature death, and the megatonnes of carbon dioxide saved.
In the household energy and food and agriculture sectors, the proposal with the biggest impact on both climate change and public health was a 10-year programme in India to replace 150 million indoor biomass-burning
stoves with low-emissions cooking stoves, according to lead author Paul Wilkinson, also at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine1.
In one year the programme would save 12,500 DALYS and 0. 1-0. 2 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent for every million people.
By comparison Wilkinson found that improving household energy efficiency in the United kingdom would save more energy 0. 6 megatonnes of carbon dioxide per million people over a year
due in part to reduced cardiovascular and respiratory disease. Another analysis, led by Sharon Friel at the Australian National University in Canberra,
%Such a change in the UK would save 2, 850 DALYS from heart disease; in S £o Paulo, Brazil, it would save 2, 1804.
however, that these strategies would not be a unilateral win for health: less livestock could lead to poor nutrition in low-income countries,
and better housing insulation could lead to health risks from factors such as more indoor air pollution.
3. The greatest health gains would result from fewer cars and increased walking in Delhi, reducing DALYS by 13,000
Though some scenarios have far greater health impacts than others even the smaller benefits are worthwhile,
Global leaders hope public health issues are taken into consideration at Copenhagen. Chan says she hopes the findings will add to the urgency of negotiations,
the health benefits are immediate and more localized, which should sweeten the deal for politicians.
citing the potential contamination of native maize: It is very, very unacceptable. See also'Maize genome sequenced'.
Herrera-Estrella's team also found more than a dozen genes related to heavy-metal detoxification and environmental-stress tolerance that were conserved in B73 and Palomero,
but that were absent from teosinte, suggesting that these genes were involved in the domestication process2.
The conservation of the metal-detoxification and stress-tolerance genes in the derived strains strongly suggests that environmental changes caused by volcanic activity represented an important driving force that acted early in maize domestication,
The board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the major funding channel for controlling these diseases, last week approved US$2. 4 billion in extra funding over two years.
Pathogen negligence: Canada's government laboratories are doing a poor job of keeping track of some pathogens, according to an audit by the Public health Agency of Canada.
The audit found that the labs'inconsistent tracking systems a mixture of manual and electronic recording might result in a pathogen being lost
or used inappropriately. The audit included the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, which handles samples of H1n1 pandemic flu,
and which earlier this year lost track of 22 vials containing harmless Ebola-virus genetic material.
Tracking systems for the most dangerous pathogens are more rigorous but could still be improved, the audit found.
scientists and politicians will release findings on the public-health effects of policies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. go. nature. com/4vfwwo 25-27 november Planetary scientists will discuss observations
Brooke Magnanti, now a cancer epidemiologist at the Bristol Initiative for Research of Child Health, UK, reveals that she was the anonymous sex worker and blogger Belle de Jour.
Environmental impact of cocaine strategy assessed: Nature Newsa controversial herbicide-spraying programme to tackle cocaine production in Colombia has few adverse environmental impacts.
That's the conclusion of a suite of studies that marks the latest chapter in a bitter environmental debate over its benefits
Spraying the herbicide glyphosate on coca plants is a key tool in the war on cocaine.
but there have long been questions over the plan's impact on animal and human health in the region.
The researchers also found that frog larvae in small artificial ponds showed few toxic effects from glyphosate exposure
The results of the various studies are published in a series of articles in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health.
Everyone agrees on concentrations that cause toxicity says Reinier Mann, an ecotoxicologist at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia.
then it is quite possible that you will get concentrations that cause toxicity, Mann says.
The team also tracked the health of 274 agricultural workers who had been exposed to glyphosate, and found no firm evidence of chromosomal or cellular damage5.
This finding contrasts with earlier research6, 7 that reported glyphosate had highly toxic effects on human cells in vitro.
as long as it chooses to continue the herbicide-spraying strategy to tackle its cocaine problem.
The dog cloner: Nature Newsfor someone who had emerged just from a 40-month trial, Byeong-Chun Lee seemed remarkably energetic.
beagles (because the dog is the best choice for human disease modelling; and the first transgenic dog (a beagle, known as Ruby Puppy,
which are used already as a model for cardiovascular and other disorders, will become more widely used through cloning and transgenics.
For some diseases dogs provide the best animal model for the human disease. But the use of cloned dogs
says Colman, now at the A*STAR Institute of Medical Biology in Singapore. Still, Lee's cloned
He is collaborating with both the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases to study chronic granulomatous disease, a rare genetic white blood cell disorder,
and the University of South carolina to study Alzheimer's disease. Brain science Institute behavioural geneticist Shigeyoshi Itohara is excited most about
what the clones could reveal about the function of the brain. With the differences between species in disposition and cognition, dogs are tremendously valuable to basic genetic studies of higher brain order.
but in 1898, drought, pestilence and hunting left the Tsavo region of Kenya barren of the lions'favourite meals.
Apart from the environmental pressures on the lions, the dominant maneater also had severe wounds in his mouth and jaw,
Nature News Liberia's caterpillar plague Panic struck Liberia in early 2009, after a plague of caterpillars struck villages around the country, munching trees
Patients at the last chance clinic In February, artist Dunham Aurelius and accountant Sally Massagee got a thorough check-up at the US National institutes of health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland.
The reason both were unrelated suffering from, unexplained diseases. Aurelius had had upwards of 18 kidney stones in about as many years
and Massagee was baffled by an extraordinary and painful build up of muscles in her body that left her weighed down and fatigued.
The two were enrolled in the NIH's new Undiagnosed Disease Program a collaborative project designed to identify previously undiscovered diseases
and characterize them at a molecular level (see'Last Chance Clinic').'Massagee, whose symptoms hinted at a novel condition involving genes that control muscle formation,
in fact received a diagnosis that already exists in the medical literature, although one with a rare presentation.
She received treatment for AL amyloidosis, a build up of protein in the walls of her blood vessels, on 19 june,
and says she is still recovering, albeit slowly. She has gone not yet back to work, but has been walking up to 2 miles each day.
which patients have high Vitamin d levels and calcification in parts of their kidneys. William Gahl
the director of the programme and clinical director at the National Human genome Research Institute in Bethesda says that of approximately 2, 500 inquiries,
the programme has seen about 140 patients. So far, one new disease with a genetic underpinning has been discovered in a family with blood-vessel calcification below the waist.
The team hopes to publish on the condition soon. The genetic pathway involved, says Gahl,
A handful of patients, like Massagee, were diagnosed with known conditions. But the majority like Aurelius, are still being studied.
but the badly damaged teaching hospital itself is not completely functional. Buildings of the faculties of engineering and humanities are two years away from completion.
On 1 march, she received the first dollars of a new R01 grant from the National institutes of health.
works with mouse models of muscular dystrophy at Ohio State university in Columbus. She declined an interview request.
The work was done by Anthony Atala at Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-salem, North carolina.
On 2 december, the US National institutes of health (NIH) approved 13 human embryonic stem-cell lines for use by US government-funded researchers the first lines to be given the green light
a standing advisory committee to NIH director Francis Collins recommended he approve an additional 27 lines,
Following a fortnight of political turmoil that saw climate-change sceptic Tony Abbott elected as leader of the opposition,
Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are dangerous to human health, the US Environmental protection agency declared on 7 december.
) They took the health ministry to court in June, arguing that the exclusion infringed a constitutional freedom of scientific research.
Movetis has European approval to market a constipation drug, prucalopride (Resolor). Market watch Amazonian nations will be the early winners in any market for forest carbon credits,
Research London medical hub: Details of a new £520-million (US$850-million) biomedical research centre in central London were outlined on 7 december.
The UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation will bring together four research institutes in one building.
Paul Nurse, president of the Rockefeller University in New york, who is leading the development of science plans for the complex,
said the budget would be tight; and operations could begin with fewer than the hoped-for 1,
Tuberculosis funds: Tuberculosis research has seen funding jump in each of the past few years, but the rate of increase is dropping off.
So says a report released on 3 december by the Treatment Action Group, an AIDS research and policy think tank based in New york. Tuberculosis funding increased by 8%last year to US$510 million,
compared with annual increases of 13%in 2007 and 17%in 2006. The balance of funding is also shifting, from government agencies to philanthropic organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Cattle disease faces total wipeout: Nature Newswhat does it take to wipe a scourge off the face of the Earth?
and eradicate the last few stubborn pockets of disease whether the problem is in people or cattle.
World health bodies say that within 18 months they will celebrate the eradication of rinderpest, the world's most devastating cattle disease.
It would become only the second disease that humans have wiped from the globe after smallpox,
says Chris Oura, head of the Non-Vesicular Disease Reference Laboratory Group at the Institute for Animal health in Pirbright,
Rinderpest tops the list of killer animal diseases, says Juan Lubroth, chief veterinary officer for the Food and Agricultural organization of the United nations (FAO) in Rome.
Just as smallpox ripped through human populations for centuries, so too has reduced rinderpest drastically animal populations.
Also known as cattle plague, rinderpest can lead to famine when people lose the beasts they need to plough their fields.
It first spread from Asia to Europe in the herds of invading tribes, causing outbreaks in the Roman empire in 376-386,
The world's first veterinary science school was established in France in 1762 to train specialists to deal with rinderpest.
The disease, which can kill 80-90%of infected cattle within ten days, is caused by a morbillivirus a group of viruses that also includes measles.
Clinical signs include fever, discharges from the eyes and nose, diarrhoea and dehydration. In the 1980s, outbreaks in Nigeria cost around US$2 billion.
But that decade also saw a breakthrough in controlling the disease: a vaccine containing the attenuated virus that was heat-stable
and could be stored and transported over long distances. In 1994, a global effort to eradicate rinderpest was launched,
headed by the FAO and the World organisation for Animal health (OIE), based in Paris. It incorporated several earlier,
regional efforts and focused on widespread vaccination programmes and on long-term monitoring of cattle and wildlife.
The last known outbreak was in Kenya in 2001, with the last remaining pockets of the disease in Pakistan, Sudan and the Somali Ecosystem (parts of Somalia,
Ethiopia and Kenya) thought to have been eradicated by 2007 (see map). Oura says that the biggest scientific challenge in eradicating the virus is the large-scale monitoring
By the 1970s, smallpox, too, was found only in the war-torn Horn of Africa, where the last case was isolated in Somalia in 1977.
Although the rinderpest vaccine can provide lifelong protection, it also poses a challenge. Because it contains the live virus
diagnostic tests can't differentiate between infected and vaccinated animals, as both will test positive for antibodies against the virus. Cows also pass on antibodies to their offspring through their milk.
So, to confirm whether the virus has been eradicated, vaccinations must stop for a period of two years
and calves younger than two years old then need to be tested. It is a difficult,
Lubroth says he is confident that the world is already free of the disease but that the FAO and the OIE expect to make an official declaration that it has been eradicated in 18 months.
Even after the disease is declared extinct in the wild, it will live on in the lab. Over the next year and a half,
Nature Newsrinderpest, the world's most devastating cattle disease, will be declared eradicated within 18 months, according to world health bodies.
The effort will make it only the second disease to be wiped from the globe the first was eradicated smallpox
Rinderpest tops the list of killer diseases in animals, says Juan Lubroth, chief veterinary officer for the Food and Agricultural organization of the United nations (FAO) in Rome.
Eradication of the disease would be a massive achievement for the veterinary community, says Chris Oura, head of the Non-Vesicular Disease Reference Laboratory Group at the Institute for Animal health in Pirbright, UK.
Rinderpest, otherwise known as cattle plague, has killed many millions of cattle and other wildlife around the world since it first spread from Asia to Europe in the herds of the invading tribes, causing outbreaks during the Roman empire in 376-386.
Since then, the disease has spread throughout Europe and on to Africa, the Middle east and the Indian subcontinent.
Outbreaks in Nigeria during the 1980s cost around $2 billion according to the FAO. The disease is caused by a virus called a morbillivirus a group that also includes the measles virus. Clinical signs include fever, discharges from the eyes and nose,
diarrhoea and dehydration and the disease kills 80-90%of infected cattle in just 7-10 days.
The last outbreak in Asia was in 2000 and the last known cases of the disease were in Kenya in 2001.
The FAO and the World organisation for Animal health (OIE), based in Paris, headed up an international effort to eradicate the disease,
which began in 1994 with the launch of the Global Rinderpest Eradication Programme. The programme's success depended on widespread vaccination programmes and long-term monitoring of cattle and wildlife.
A breakthrough in controlling the disease came in the 1980's when a heat-stable vaccine was developed that contained the attenuated virus,
allowing the vaccine to be stored and transported over long distances. Oura says that the biggest scientific challenges in eradicating the virus is the large-scale monitoring
and surveillance needed to ensure that the virus is gone. It's a huge task when you have the virus in developing countries and war zones, such as Somalia,
to carry out monitoring and surveillance, he says. Although the vaccine can provide lifelong protection, it has caused also some problems.
Because it contains the live virus diagnostic tests can't differentiate between infected and vaccinated animals,
as both will test positive for antibodies against the virus. Cows also pass on antibodies to their offspring through their milk.
To evaluate whether the virus has been eradicated, vaccinations must stop for a period of two years and calves less than two years old tested.
It is a difficult, long process to make sure nothing is there, says Oura. Lubroth says he is confident that the world is already free of the disease
but that the FAO and the OIE expect to make an official declaration that rinderpest has been eradicated in 18 months.
Bernard Vallat director-general of the OIE, says that the holdup is because 12 countries have not yet submitted their final test and surveillance results to the organization.
He adds that over the next year and a half, the OIE will be drawing up an inventory
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