Biodiversity's ills not all down to climate change: Nature Newsclimate change is affecting the world in many ways.
I argue more complex than climate science humans are doing much more harm to wild species than just adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
new specimens from abroad are held in quarantine houses until they've been checked for diseases or fungus that might pose a threat.
says that conserving global plant genetic diversity is the only way to develop crops that are adapted to changing climates and resistant to new diseases.
Keith Goulding, a soil chemist at the agricultural research centre Rothamsted Research, in Harpenden, UK,
The commission met in part to discuss last year's revelations that US government researchers secretly gave syphilis to hundreds of Guatemalan prison inmates in the 1940s (see Nature 467,645;
) But the Associated press, trawling medical journals and old newspaper articles, dug up more than 40 instances of similarly dubious tests.
All had been disclosed publicly, unlike the syphilis experiments, but did not draw the condemnation at the time that they would today.
Oil-spill health study A study claiming to be the largest ever to follow up the long-term effects of an oil spill on human health was launched on 28 february (see nihgulfstudy. org.
The National institutes of health says it has committed US$19 million to the project so far; its National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences hopes to spend a decade following 55,000 of the workers
and volunteers who supported the cleanup effort after the Deepwater horizon disaster in the Gulf of mexico. Booking a rocket The first contracts have been signed to send researchers into suborbit using commercial spacecraft.
Scientists would conduct experiments including biomedical monitoring and atmospheric imaging. Viral response plan Medical virologists from around the world gathered in WASHINGTON DC on 1 3 march to work out the details of a Global Virus Response Network.
Meeting attendees, invited by virologist Robert Gallo of the University of Maryland School of medicine in Baltimore,
health organizations and the public about existing viruses and attract scientists to the field. Wheat killer A research programme tackling a devastating wheat fungus has been granted US$40 million over five years as part of a partnership between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington,
aims to create plants that can withstand strains of the evolving stem-rust pathogen Ug99.
Coming up 3 6 march The American Association for Cancer Research hosts a conference in Vancouver,
and cancer. go. nature. com/5lwqim 7 11 march Preliminary analysis of dust picked up from a distant asteroid last year by the Hayabusa spacecraft will be among highlights of the 42nd Lunar and Planetary Science
near Houston, Texas. go. nature. com/eugq9g 9 13 march The 10th International Conference on Alzheimer's
& Parkinson's diseases will take place in Barcelona, Spain, and focus on new possibilities for treating the conditions. go. nature. com/jcgygu Â
if blood tests show they have natural testosterone levels in the male range, according to rules accepted by the International Association of Athletics Federations on 12 april.
Virus sharing In the event of a future flu pandemic, member states of the World health organization (WHO) will send samples of flu virus to laboratories and drug makers around the world,
in return for greater access to any vaccines created. The deal announced by THE WHO on 17 april,
heads off the prospect of countries refusing to share samples with WHO laboratories in protest at not benefiting from resulting research patents
or vaccines 墉 as Indonesia did in 2007. Events Cleanup visions for Fukushima As workers continue to douse stricken reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant with water,
People Research fraud Prosecutors in the United states are seeking to extradite a Danish scientist researching the relationship between autism and vaccines, who,
Poul Thorsen was a visiting scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta in the 1990s.
Nobel chemist dies William Lipscomb, who won the 1976 Nobel prize in Chemistry for his work on chemical bonding,
Research Brain atlas debuts A genetic and anatomical map of the human brain, bankrolled by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen,
Grants aim to fight malnutrition: Nature Newsnearly US$20 million in new grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will be spent on getting nutritionally enhanced rice and cassava to market and decreasing malnourishment in Asia and Africa.
and contribute to around 7%of deaths and 10%of the disease burden in low-income countries, according to Juan Pablo Pena-Rosas, coordinator of the Micronutrients Unit at the World health organization in Geneva, Switzerland.
and disease burden related to nutritional deficiencies, according to Lawrence Kent, head of agricultural development at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington.
I'm optimistic that biofortification can help to improve people's health and lives because we are using sustainable foods that people already grow,
there is no mother who would not want to use them to increase the health of her kids,
focusing on regions important for freshwater resources and where pollution has had a negative impact on health such as villages with high rates of cancer or endemic diseases.
And animal feed in China is loaded with additives such as antibiotics and heavy metals, making many farmers reluctant to use manure as a replacement for chemical fertilizers.
The team then plugged those concentrations into a piece of software called ERICA (Environmental Risk from Ionising Contaminants) to calculate the radiation dose that various groups of wildlife would have received.
the harm would probably have been much more severe, especially for plants. Radiation effects on egg hatching and the survival of newborn mammals still need to be surveyed
over how radiation affects the fitness of birds and invertebrates. A recent study2 that reports reduced survival in barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, where dose rates are now barely above natural values,
Nature Newspolicy Business Events Research People Trend watch Coming up Policy Smallpox stocks The World health organization (WHO) has failed to decide
when to destroy the world's last two remaining stocks of the virus that causes smallpox.
A meeting of THE WHO's decision-making body, the World Health Assembly, this week was supposed to produce a deadline,
HIV scandal The last plaintiff suing Japan's government and five biomedical companies over HIV infection caused by tainted blood products settled last week for ¥28 million (US$340, 000) in damages.
Since 1989, nearly 1, 400 patients 墉 mostly haemophiliacs 墉 have sued after being infected in the 1980s by blood coagulants that were treated not to kill viruses.
In 1996 Naoto Kan, then health minister and now prime minister of Japan, admitted partial government responsibility in the scandal (see Nature 379,663;
1996). ) The court cases may now be closed, but the patients are stuck with the virus. The health ministry says that it will continue to support their treatment.
Deforestation surges in the Amazon Brazil's environment minister Izabella Teixeira has vowed to crack down harder on loggers clearing trees in the Amazon rainforest, after a sudden rise in deforestation.
Business Hepatitis approvals As expected, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved what is only the second drug to directly target the hepatitis C virus. Telaprevir (Incivek),
marketed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was given the green light on 23 may 墉 10 days after the agency approved boceprevir (Victrelis) made by Merck of Whitehouse Station, New jersey.
TEPCO's losses The operators of Japan's stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant announced a net loss of ¥1. 25 trillion (US$15. 3 billion) for the year ending 31 March,
Takeda drug deal Japanese drug giant Takeda will buy Swiss drug maker Nycomed for ¢ 9. 6 billion (US$13. 6 billion),
Its last major deal was an $8. 8-billion acquisition of biotech firm Millennium Pharmaceuticals,
Genome grants The US National institutes of health's ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) programme which aims to catalogue all the functional elements of the human genome,
devoted to understanding the biological pathology behind psychiatric disorders is held in Prague. go. nature. com/uxjkz1 Â
Cornman, a geneticist for the Bee Research Laboratory of the US Department of agriculture (USDA) in Beltsville, Maryland, is trying to characterize the various pathogens that plague the honeybee (Apis mellifera), arguably the world's most important insect.
Then we can start looking at the interactions of pathogens and see if they're more virulent than any by themselves.
There has been made a lot of progress on how disease affects honeybees at the molecular level, says Christina Grozinger, director of Pennsylvania State university's Center for Pollinator Research in University Park, one of the conference organizers.
A syndrome dubbed colony collapse disorder (CCD) has been causing the insects to die off in large numbers,
In some insects, double stranded-rna RNA, a hallmark of viral infection, can provoke a specific antiviral immune response.
At the meeting, Michelle Flenniken, a virologist at the University of California, San francisco, presented evidence that, in honeybees, it can also trigger a general immune response that might ward off a variety of threats.
What we think we've found is a window into this new immune-response pathway. Flenniken adds that knowing more about the bee's immune responses might help researchers to find ways of priming the system
and help bees to cope with their foes at the genomic level. Such a prospect may be a long way off,
Clinic shut down One of the world's most notorious stem-cell therapy centres had to cease operations last week
and Cologne, injected stem cells from bone marrow into the brain, spinal cord and other body parts of patients.
Australian budget The feared Aus$400-million (US$430-million) cuts in government funding for medical research have not appeared in Australia's 10 may federal budget,
Business Stem-cell trials California's state stem-cell agency can for the first time say that it is funding a clinical trial.
On 4 may, the board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) in San francisco voted to give a US$25-million loan to Geron of Menlo Park
California, which in 2009 was the first company to get US approval to undertake a clinical trial involving human embryonic stem cells.
translation of stem cells from research tools to therapies was a major selling point. 3d transistors Computer-chip manufacturer Intel has announced that it will mass-produce three-dimensional transistors for its next generation of chips.
Research Cholera in Haiti The cholera epidemic currently raging through Haiti was introduced inadvertently to the country through faecal contamination of river water,
who are suspected widely of carrying in the strain (which matches cholera strains circulating in Nepal).
The outbreak 墉 the first in Haiti in nearly a century 墉 had killed by Mid-april almost 4,
900 people and made 286,000 ill. Gravity probe B NASA announced on 4 may that its Gravity Probe B mission 墉 conceived
what could be the world's largest research database linking genetic profiles with health records.
already launched at the Boston VA Medical center, would be expanded across the nation over the next 5 7 years.
the programme will be larger than other major personalized medicine initiatives, such as the UK Biobank, which has enrolled 500,000 volunteers.
Trend watch A pivotal paper by chemist John Fenn saw huge numbers of citations almost immediately after its 1989 publication,
Canada. go. nature. com/ukzje9 16 24 may The 64th World Health Assembly, meeting in Geneva,
whether to destroy smallpox stocks. go. nature. com/th3feu 16 19 may Eighteen Nobel laureates are participating in a symposium on global sustainability in Stockholm. go. nature. com/f7mow7 Â
Researchers from the United kingdom studied the direct transmission of foot-and-mouth disease from one cow to another in a unique experimental setup that might also find applications in the study of other pathogens.
Foot-and-mouth is a highly infectious disease that can have a huge impact on farmers'livelihoods.
Endemic in many parts of Africa and South america, the virus that causes the disease has been eradicated in much of Europe and North america.
Now a paper published in Science1 suggests that the aggressive approach taken in 2001 to control infection may not be necessary.
It shows that the window in which infected cattle can transmit the disease to other animals is actually shorter than previously believed and
crucially, that the infectious period occurs after the appearance of disease symptoms. Bryan Charleston, a foot-and-mouth expert at the UK Institute for Animal health in Pirbright, Surrey which is on the site where the virus leaked in 2007
while monitoring a complex set of data such as blood samples, temperature and lesions on the animals.
the first study in a target host of an actual viral disease where we've looked at transmission parameters by carrying out one-to-one infections rather than looking at proxies,
The team found that the cattle in their study were not infectious until around 0. 5 days after clinical signs appeared,
Charleston and his co-authors suggest that the fact that cattle are less likely to be infectious before showing clinical signs means that
during an epidemic, culling on farms that are at risk of infection could be unnecessary.
Careful monitoring for signs of infection could be used instead. In the 2001 outbreak, some 700,000 cattle were culled to fight the disease,
says co-author Mark Woolhouse, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Only a small fraction of these actually had the virus,
he says. Neil Ferguson, a mathematical biologist at Imperial College London, says that there has been some debate in the foot
-and-mouth community about whether the disease was transmitted pre-clinically or not. He adds: The paper is fantastic in terms of being one of the few studies that quantify how infectious animals are as a function of how long they've been infected and
It puts greater emphasis on really trying to speed up diagnoses of infection on farms. However, improving the speed of diagnosis could prove logistically difficult in practice.
Although those controlling the 2007 outbreak eschewed the mass culling used in 2001, the later incident was contained geographically more,
so less-aggressive measures were used to stop the disease from spreading. Matthew Keeling, an expert on disease modelling at the University of Warwick
near Coventry, UK, also points out that much of the modelling used to predict disease spread and best responses to outbreaks actually works on the level of the farm, rather than of the individual animal.
He agrees that the study does highlight the benefits of early detection. It tells us
if to other infectious diseases such as influenza. The difference in foot-and-mouth disease infectiousness predicted previously and that found through the experimental study shows a need for better evidence
when forming policy on the control of acute diseases, he says. The pioneering experiment has been welcomed by many researchers in the field,
but Keeling points out that these one-to-one infection studies are not an easy undertaking:
The amount of work that went into this for just eight animals being infected was enormous.
together with an international team, is studying the long-term ecological and health consequences of the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine.
these colours are real-life indicators of population viability and individual health. If we can amass long-term data sets before these disasters we can get a sense of the changes that occur due to humans.
Nevertheless, he and other biologists have argued for years that scoring bird pigments by eye is not as persuasive as a chemical analysis,
Nature Newspolicy Funding Events Research Trend watch Coming up Policy Pathogen dangers A US panel has named the most dangerous pathogens with potential for misuse.
The pathogens include bacteria and viruses that cause smallpox, the plague, anthrax, Ebola and foot-and-mouth disease.
and toxins',including camel, goat and sheep pox viruses. The report was a response to an executive order from US President Barack Obama last year.
Asylum DNA tests The UK Border Agency has ended a plan to use DNA samples to determine the nationalities of asylum seekers.
Global drug safety Pronouncing itself at the centre of a global bazaar, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has announced its intention to assemble an international coalition of regulatory agencies to strengthen product safety worldwide.
In a report released on 20 june, the FDA says that it will build a global data network that will allow regulators to proactively share real-time information.
the report notes, for example, that 80%of the active ingredients in medications sold in the United states come from elsewhere.
The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, based in Chevy Chase, Maryland, joined with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation in Palo alto, California,
they are now being monitored for stress and other adverse affects. Employees were evacuated safely from the centre.
Drug-approval race Since 2003 the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved more cancer drugs than the European Medicines Agency (EMA),
and approved those drugs more quickly, according to a report in Health Affairs on 16 june. Up to the end of March 2010, the US agency had approved 32 new anticancer drugs,
whereas the EMA had approved 26. The median time from submission to approval was 182 days in the United states and 350 days in Europe.
Janet Woodcock, the FDA's top drug-approval official, says that the difference extends to all categories of drug.
See go. nature. com/ouxsup for more. UK health research The UK government has promised that medical research will receive greater attention in its revised proposals for reforming the country's public health service,
published on 14 june. Britain's health minister would be given a new duty to promote research in the National Health Service,
the plans say. See go. nature. com/x4qsbb for more. Trend watch The solar-energy industry's drive to cut costs got a sharp boost in June,
Bacterial infections often originate from contaminated food, but it is now about six weeks since the start of this outbreak and the trail is going cold.
Case-control studies of patients in the German outbreak pointed to salad vegetables and both cucumbers and beansprouts have been suspects.
Pathogenic E coli are passed typically to humans from ruminant animals (cows or sheep) via faecal contamination in the food chain or through consumption of raw milk or meat products.
H4, makes Shiga toxin, which is responsible for the severe diarrhoea and kidney damage in patients
whose E coli infections develop into haemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS). The genes for the Shiga toxin are not actually bacterial genes,
but phage genes being expressed by infected bacteria. So when an E coli bacterium gets infected with a Shiga-toxin-producing phage,
it becomes pathogenic to humans. Our use of antibiotics may be helping those viral genes to spread.
If bacteria are exposed to some types of antibiotics they undergo what is called the SOS response,
which induces the phage to start replicating. Active replication of the phage causes the bacterial cells to burst open,
which releases the phage. It also releases the toxin, which is why antibiotics are used not usually to treat E coli infections (see'Europe's E coli outbreak:
time for the antibiotics?'.'One of the many unusual characteristics of strain O104: H4 is that it has resistance genes to multiple classes of antibiotics.
This suggests that wherever the bacteria have come from there has been selective pressure to resist antibiotics.
Heather Allison, a microbiologist at the University of Liverpool, UK, and David Acheson, a managing director for food safety at consulting firm Leavitt Partners in WASHINGTON DC, agree it is plausible that exposure to antibiotics in agricultural use
or in the environment might be enhancing the spread of Shiga-toxin-producing phage. Acheson worked on this question
when he led a research group at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, studying the molecular pathogenesis of Shiga-toxin-producing E coli in the 1990s.
He says they saw Shiga-toxin-producing phage transfer between E coli in response to sub-therapeutic levels of the antibiotic ciprofloxacin in vitro and in the intestines of mice.
They do it in the laboratory, he says, but it's hard to show it happens in the environment.
He is convinced it does, though. The potential for the creation of new pathogens via phage release is absolutely a factor in the broader environmental danger of overuse of antibiotics.
Agricultural use of antibiotics is a possible suspect. Phage are particularly abundant in the guts of ruminants
says Alfredo Caprioli, from the European Reference Laboratory for verotoxin-producing E coli in Rome, Italy (verotoxin is another name for Shiga toxin).
And the gut is one place in which the phage move between different bacteria, and new pathogenic bacterial strains emerge.
Shiga toxins have been causing diarrhoeal disease in humans for centuries the bacterial genus Shigella and the Shiga toxins were named first for Kiyoshi Shiga,
a Japanese medical doctor who identified the bacterium during an outbreak of dysentery in Japan in 1897.
According to Allison, Shiga-toxin producing phage probably picked up the genes encoding Shiga toxin from these bacteria,
and since the 1980s have been spreading these virulent genes to other bacteria, including many strains of E coli.
We are seeing more and more Shiga-toxin-producing strains says Alison Weiss, microbiologist at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio.
How have Shiga-toxin-producing phage spread so widely in just a few decades? Allison says they have unusual characteristics that make them very successful.
They infect bacteria by binding to a protein called Bama on the surface of many bacterial cells,
which gives them a broad range of hosts. Most phage can only infect a host cell once,
but Shiga-toxin-producing phage can infect the same cell multiple times, giving them greater pathogenic potential.
And they can survive outside their hosts, in water or soil, for example. Weiss adds that carrying the phage also provides a survival advantage for the host bacteria.
Once the bacteria are out in the environment say in manure they are fed on by other microbes
such as protozoans. The toxins kill the other microbes, giving these bacteria an advantage. Not only are more E coli strains being infected with Shiga toxin,
but it seems to be moving into different classes of bacteria. The genome of strain O104:
H4 has been sequenced, and it shares many genes with enteroaggerative E coli (EAEC) strains. EAEC strains are associated not typically with zoonotic infections,
and EAEC and Shiga toxin is a very unusual combination, says Caprioli. This increased movement of Shiga-toxin-producing phage means that even more unusual and dangerous strains could be on the horizon.
Sustainable management of tropical forests has a long way to go: Nature Newsless than 10%of permanent tropical forests are under a sustainable management plan,
according to a study by the International Tropical Timber Organization (ITTO) an intergovernmental organization based in Yokohama, Japan,
whose 33 timber-producing members account for around 85%of the world's tropical forests. Between 2005 and 2010, the amount of land in the tropics designated as permanently forested
which must legally remain forested rather than be converted to agriculture or other land uses and under sustainable management grew from around 36 million hectares to around 53 million hectares, an increase of nearly 50%.
Nature Newsthe bacterium responsible for the current outbreak of enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) infections in Germany is a strain that has never before been isolated in humans.
means that the infection could prove unusually difficult to bring under control. Scientists in Germany are feverishly analysing the genome sequence of the bacterium,
and have found clues as to how this strain which has infected so far more than 1, 500 people and killed 18 is making so many people ill.
The bacteria are relatively unusual in that they produce extended-spectrum à Â-lactamases enzymes that render the bacteria resistant to many different antibiotics.
Patients with E coli infections are treated not typically with antibiotics anyway, because the bacteria are thought to respond to the medication by increasing production of the Shiga toxin,
which can lead to the life-threatening complication haemolytic-uremic syndrome. But antibiotic resistance might have helped the bacteria to survive
and persist in the environment. EHEC outbreaks usually only last around two weeks, but this outbreak has been going on
since 1 may or earlier, says Angelika Fruth, a microbiologist based in Wernigerode who works for the Robert Koch Institute, the federal agency responsible for disease control.
The number of new cases is still rising suggesting that whatever their source, the bacteria are still infecting people.
A case-control study of female patients and healthy women, conducted by epidemiologists from the Robert Koch Institute,
revealed that the ill women were more likely than the controls to have eaten tomatoes, cucumbers and salad vegetables prior to contracting the disease,
but exactly which vegetables are responsible, if any, is unclear. Early reports that the outbreak originated in cucumbers imported from Spain were shown later to be incorrect the cucumbers contained the bacterial toxins,
but not the bacteria responsible for the ourbreak themselves. Fresh vegetables are still the prime suspect
This strain has never been found in any animal, so it is possible that it could have come from straight from the environment into humans.
In addition to the antibiotic-resistance genes, the bacteria contain a gene for resistance to the mineral tellurite (tellurium dioxide.
Tellurium oxides were used as antimicrobial agents against diseases such as leprosy and tuberculosis before the development of antibiotics.
Some strains of bacteria may have evolved resistance to tellurium during its historical medical use, or after its use in the mining and electronics industries increased its presence in the environment.
According to Wieler, the strain's resistance characteristics could point towards an environmental source, such as water or soil.
The ongoing genetic characterization of the strain might also reveal why the bacteria is mostly infecting adults,
EHEC infections usually occur in children and affect boys and girls equally. Initial theories suggested that young adult women are the people most likely to purchase,
But he suspects that the strain might have biological characteristics that make adults more susceptible to the infection.
One telltale sign is that the strain does not contain the eae gene, which codes for a protein called intimin,
Eae-negative E coli have been associated specifically with adult infections before although it is still unclear why this particular protein is more effective in adult guts than in those of children.
Gad Frankel, a microbiologist at Imperial College London, suspects that the genome of this strain will reveal more information about the adherence mechanisms of E coli.
It is possible that the strain has evolved a combination of adhesion proteins that makes it particularly hard to remove from food,
This outbreak has shown we need to be prepared to deal with emerging strains with properties that give them enhanced virulence
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