The degree of decay was proportional to the degree of radioactive contamination at each site according to the study published in the journal Oecologia.
and other contaminants via smoke into populated areas Mousseau said. This litter accumulation that we measured
The members of the group taking protein supplements were also less likely to visit doctors for infections during the study published in 2003 in the Journal of Applied Physiology.
and consequences of this diet and how the U s. industrialized food system could be a major contributor to the national obesity epidemic.
But in Spisak s case the analysis involved tiny amounts of DNA which made Lusk think that contamination
In a follow up study uploaded few weeks ago on arxiv he concludes that Spisak must consider contamination as the source of PLANT DNA.
Researchers are also looking into ways to treat bacterial infections in livestock using phages but Sulakvelidze said that results from these tests are inconclusive so far.
and at least 23000 people die each year as a direct result of these infections.##Phages are a hopeful alternative.
whether this plant-infecting virus could also cause systemic infection in the bees said Yan Ping Chen a study author who works at ARS.
and that the infection becomes widespread in their bodies said Ji Lian Li another study author who works at China's agricultural science academy in Beijing.
and whether such a virus could cause systemic infection in the honeybees. Since CCD was reported first to have wiped out entire hives across the United states in 2006 and 2007 more than 10 million hives in all researchers have linked strongly toxic viral cocktails to the collapse of the honeybee colonies.
In fact as I wrote last August researchers in the past year have begun to focus on multiple layers of viral infection
or chemical contamination as the most likely reason for CCD. In short waves of either chemical contamination
or viral infections are overwhelming the honeybees and the hives. Last summer for instance researchers from the University of Maryland and the USDA collected pollen from seven major types of crops along the East Coast where CCD has been especially destructive where bees had been in serious decline and fed
them to healthy bees. The pollen fed to the healthy bees contained an average of nine different types of pesticides and fungicides.
because it lacks an internal genomic process that edits out errors in replicated genomes meaning that TRSV can generate all sorts of variant error-filled copies with lots of different infection characteristics that cannot be defended easily once they jump from plants to honeybees and spread throughout the hives.
and Chinese researchers said is that such clouds of viral infections in colonies are likely responsible for the collapse of hives.
Weak colonies those with high levels of multiple viral infections start failing in late fall
and supports the view that viral infections have a significant negative impact on colony survival the U s
Magnesium applied directly to the skin is said to treat skin infections and speed up wound healing.
but they may also boost a person's immunity when dealing with everyday viruses and infections like the common cold.
if they have developed antibodies to the virus. The investigation into the Ebola Reston infections began after farmers in the Philippines reported high mortality rates in their pigs in 2008.
the infections resulted from contact with a reservoir of the virus, rather than spreading from animal to animal.
and the threat of infection could be reduced by moving fruit trees, where the bats roost, away from pig farms,
Wheat genes could help fight fungal epidemics: Nature Newsas farmers around the world anxiously monitor the march of a deadly orange fungus across their wheat fields,
The results are welcome news as plant pathologists race to arm themselves against an ongoing epidemic of stem rust (P. graminis) caused by a recently emerged fungus called Ug99 (see'Wheat fungus spreads out of Africa'.
'The epidemic was isolated first in Uganda and has since spread eastwards into Iran. From there, pathologists believe wind currents may sweep Ug99 spores into India and, eventually, China.
Meanwhile, new types of stripe rust that can overcome the defences bred into commercial varieties have sparked a separate epidemic in the United states. It is amazing that we are still fighting this battle,
The team speculates that the proteins work by transporting metabolites that impede fungal growth to the site of the infection.
which requires a live host less time to establish an infection, the researchers say. Dubcovsky discovered the second fungi-fighting gene several years ago
he noticed that it was more resistant to rust infection than strains with normal protein content.
Neither Yr36 nor Lr34 can fully protect wheat against infection. In one study, infected wheat carrying only Lr34 had stripe rust covering 60%of its uppermost leaf
The influenza pandemic policies and responses recommended and taken by WHO were influenced not improperly by the pharmaceutical industry,
Researchers from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warn that pregnant women might be increased at risk for complications from pandemic H1n1 in a research paper in eventid=login>The Lancet (hithardbyswi. html>more on this story.
At this time, there is no evidence to indicate the development of widespread antiviral resistance among pandemic H1n1 viruses.
making it only the second known swine infection outside of Canada. 22 june 2009: Chinese state news source Xinhua reports tests have begun on the first H1n1 vaccine developed in the country.
The world is in a full-blown influenza pandemic for the first time in 41 years. 9 june 2009: THE WHO reports that Inuit communities in Canada may be particularly hard-hit.
It continues to face questions as to why a full-blown pandemic has not been declared. 8 june 2009:
THE WHO says it is 6swineflupandemic get. html>inching closer to moving its pandemic alert status to phase 6,
which would denote official global pandemic status. 1 june 2009: June opens with 17,410 cases reported in 62 countries,
and declaring a pandemic, that the global extent of a pandemic should be described objectively and should be just one factor in decisions about how to respond.
22 may 2009: Australia raises its alert level to'Contain, 'even as the Mexican government relaxes its restrictions in Mexico city.
However the pandemic alert level is still at five today, one level below a full pandemic.
A modeling study in Science suggests that the virus spreads at a rate comparable to that of previous influenza pandemics.
THE WHO raises pandemic level alert to phase 5, a strong signal that a pandemic is imminent.
First swine-flu death outside Mexico reported as a baby dies in Texas. 161/nn200120/DE/Content/Service/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/2009/082009. html>Germany joins European countries with H1n1
THE WHO 0427/en/index. html>raises pandemic alert level to 4 having confirmed human-to-human transmission able to cause'community-level outbreaks'.
'Phase 4 indicates a significant increase in risk of a pandemic but does not necessarily mean that a pandemic is a forgone conclusion,
says the organisation. 25 april 2009: WHO director-general, Margaret Chan calls the flu problem a public health emergency of 0425/en/index. html>international concern.
but could also pose an infection risk. Researchers have used also the genome sequence to assemble a collection of more than 37,000 locations in the genome that contain frequent single-base changes in DNA sequence2.
Nature Newspublic-health experts are warning that a lack of surveillance may be allowing the 2009 pandemic H1n1 flu virus to go undetected in pigs.
Their main concern tends to be that any reports of the pandemic virus in pigs might provoke overreactions such as the mass culling of pigs that took place in Egypt
Within minutes of the World health organization (WHO) announcement on 11 june that swine flu had become a pandemic, Bernard Vallat, director-general of an intergovernmental trade body,
and his colleagues concluded that the lack of systematic swine surveillance allowed for the undetected persistence and evolution of this potentially pandemic strain for many years.
The pandemic virus has so far been found in pigs from just one farm, in Alberta, Canada,
Past pandemic viruses have gone also on to become endemic in pig populations. It's absolutely surprising that a virus this contagious in both humans and swine
Absence of evidence of the pandemic virus in pig populations is not evidence of absence,
however its member states to voluntarily report any occurrences of the 2009 pandemic virus in pigs.
Network members hope that with the pandemic highlighting the need for better pig surveillance new funding will be forthcoming.
-and public-health communities underestimated the potential for pigs to generate a pandemic virus . Although pigs can be infected with many subtypes of flu,
Most expected that any new pandemic would involve the introduction of a viral subtype not previously seen in humans,
The consensus was that a pandemic could not be caused by H1, H2 or H3 because the current human population would have antibodies against them,
The emergence of the reassorted H1n1 pandemic virus which current research indicates noone has any immunity to, apart, perhaps,
Pandemic flu viruses brew for years before going global: Nature Newsfamily trees for pandemic influenza have revealed that components of deadly flu viruses probably lurk in humans
and other animals for years before they emerge as a worldwide threat to human health.
The work suggests that a more thorough characterization of circulating flu viruses could provide clues to an emerging pandemic before it hits.
ultimately giving rise to the dangerous assortment of genes carried by the 1918 virus. This work suggests that the generation of pandemic strains
is key to identifying possible pandemic strains and their future evolution. Yi Guan of the University of Hong kong, Robert Webster of St jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee,
and then swapped genes with mammalian flu viruses before becoming a pandemic. Meanwhile, elements of the 1957 pandemic flu virus also thought to be a mosaic of human
and avian flu genes were introduced probably into human populations two to six years before the pandemic, the researchers found.
These analyses were completed before the current pandemic swine flu strain made its mark, but the researchers argue that their results have implications for future pandemics.
Results from 1918 and 1957 pandemic flu suggest that public-health authorities should track the sequences of all influenza virus genes in emerging strains
the authors argue, rather than focusing largely on the gene that encodes the haemagglutinin'protein,
which is critical for vaccine production, as is the current practice. Nevertheless, reliance upon patchy data from historical flu viruses has its limitations.
Swine flu shares some features with 1918 pandemic: Nature Newsas far as your immune system is concerned, the pandemic H1n1 (swine flu virus currently circling the globe bears an uncanny resemblance to an influenza virus that wreaked havoc nearly a century ago,
researchers have found. For months, it has been apparent that swine flu strikes the young more often than the old an unusual pattern that suggests older patients could have been exposed to similar viruses in the past.
In all but the pig, the virus yields an infection in the lungs that is more severe than would be expected from an average seasonal flu, according to Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his colleagues,
are effective against the new pandemic virus in human cells grown in the lab. These drugs are already being used to treat some infected patients.
exposure to similar viruses that circulated from the 1920s to 1950s was not enough to elicit these antibodies a result that doesn't mesh with the lower infection rates among those who are over the age of 60
nevertheless offer some protection against infection, Brown says. At present, most swine flu infections are mild, and the severity of the present pandemic does not come close to the 1918 flu,
but experts worry that the new virus could become more virulent over time. Meanwhile, the virulence seen in the animal studies is disquieting,
says Brown. We're trying not to push the panic buttons, but we're trying to be realistic,
Pandemic flu: People infected with the H1n1 swine flu virus who are otherwise healthy should not routinely be given antiviral drugs,
) Environment Mercury contamination: A quarter of fish sampled from 291 streams across the United states between 1998 and 2005 contained levels of mercury higher than those deemed safe for human consumption,
An experimental HIV vaccine has shown moderate success at preventing infection by the virus. A US$119-million study involving more than 16,000 HIV-negative men
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,
But researchers say that past landrace contaminations from illegal GM maize planting (see Nature 456,149;
In September, the trial was said to show that a vaccine combination reduced the risk of HIV infection by nearly one-third.
citing the potential contamination of native maize: It is very, very unacceptable. See also'Maize genome sequenced'.
which handles samples of H1n1 pandemic flu, and which earlier this year lost track of 22 vials containing harmless Ebola-virus genetic material.
and how infection helps to protect against disease. This paper shows that the first days of life are very important,
whereas genes linked with infection-fighting T cells were expressed in the outdoor-bred pigs. Glenn Gibson, a food microbiologist at the University of Reading, UK, says that previous studies have suggested that immune responses are linked to organisms in the gut.
if this bug is the one responsible for human infections. With the Dutch Institute for Public health and the Environment, Roest's team is carrying out genome sequencing and comparisons of different strains.
from understanding how the bacteria are distributed at such a large scale to correlating measurements of BACTERIAL DNA levels in bulk milk tank samples with infection rates.
The genes cause plant cells around the infection site to die, stopping the fungus from further infecting the plant.
The concern is that other wheat-growing countries will become vulnerable to infection. Eventually it will reach North america
and the wheat plants have fewer defences against infection, says Pretorius. Pretorius and his team analysed the genomes of the new stem rust variants
Mosquito saliva may signal infection outbreaks: Nature Newsbaiting mosquito traps with cards soaked in honey,
As a result, it would be nearly impossible to quantify the risk of infection on the basis of the amount of VIRAL RNA on the cards
and to calculate the infection rate in mosquitoes and assess the potential threat. Next, van den Hurk will compare the sensitivity of the approach with those of other standard methods,
Pandemic over: The World health organization (WHO) announced on 10 august that the world is no longer experiencing an H1n1 influenza virus pandemic.
An emergency committee, which convened that day, said that countries were generally not reporting out-of-season outbreaks of the flu strain,
director-general of THE WHO, said the pandemic had turned out better than feared because the virus hadn't mutated into a more lethal form
preventing contamination that could otherwise cast doubt on the analysis. Boaretto explains that she is on site
Events Cholera in Haiti The escalating cholera epidemic in Haiti had claimed more than 900 lives and caused close to 15,000 infections by the start of this week, according to the Haitian Ministry of Public health and Population.
The cholera strain is most closely related to one from south Asia the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, has said,
unlike the mouse version, it develops symptoms similar to those seen in humans with the disease, such as infection and inflammation in the lungs.
Epidemics are currently raging in the United kingdom and United states, and the oomycete annually destroys more than US$6 billion worth of crops worldwide.
and his team found that B. graminis genes responsible for infection and pathogenicity are located also in areas of the genome that are enriched with non-coding DNA repeats.
The agency would also have to identify the most significant contaminants and issue science-based guidance on how to fight them.
Trend watch Growth of the global AIDS epidemic seems to have stabilized, said the UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) on 23 november (see chart).
Numbers of new HIV infections have dropped, thanks in part to increased condom use and availability.
But there are still two new infections for every person starting treatment, said UNAIDS, and funds for prevention are inadequate and poorly allocated.
for any contamination of their neighbours'non-GM fields. The Federal Constitutional Court said on 24 november that the 2004 (amended in 2008) legislation,
Most of the birds that received the primary infection died, but didn't pass on the flu to any of their uninfected cagemates.
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,
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.
and five biomedical companies over HIV infection caused by tainted blood products settled last week for ¥28 million (US$340, 000) in damages.
In some insects, double stranded-rna RNA, a hallmark of viral infection, can provoke a specific antiviral immune response.
Research Cholera in Haiti The cholera epidemic currently raging through Haiti was introduced inadvertently to the country through faecal contamination of river water,
Now a paper published in Science1 suggests that the aggressive approach taken in 2001 to control infection may not be necessary.
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,
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,
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.
but Keeling points out that these one-to-one infection studies are not an easy undertaking:
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.
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.
whose E coli infections develop into haemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS). The genes for the Shiga toxin are not actually bacterial genes,
which is why antibiotics are used not usually to treat E coli infections (see'Europe's E coli outbreak:
EAEC strains are associated not typically with zoonotic infections, and EAEC and Shiga toxin is a very unusual combination,
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,
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,
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.
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.
measuring contamination levels and assessing the long-term threat. Their first results, to appear in the Japanese journal Radioisotopes in August,
with combined levels of caesium-134 and caesium-137 ranging from thousands to about 1 Â million Bq kg-1. But leaves that unfolded afterwards were largely free of contamination.
Without data on the true depth of soil contamination, local schools are using large machines to scoop up the top 50 Â centimetres of soil probably much more than is necessary
West africans at risk from bat epidemics: Nature Newsserious viruses carried by bats pose a considerable risk to people in West Africa,
and his colleagues fear that the next big epidemic could come from henipaviruses, which can cause fatal encephalitis or respiratory disease in humans.
Spread of infection from bats to humans is an increasing problem in Asia and Africa
In its Report on the Global Tobacco Epidemic, 20111, the World health organization provides statistics from multiple countries showing that packet warnings,
whether the public-health benefits of the work outweigh the risks of a potential pandemic if the virus escaped from the lab. For the scientists who have created the mutated strains of the H5n1 virus,
and other animals for the mutations that would provide an early warning of a pandemic
and that it sends a valuable warning about the potential for the virus to spark a human pandemic.
Scientists contacted By nature say that basic research on such mutated strains may eventually yield insight relevant to developing pandemic countermeasures such as drugs and vaccines.
which are only capable of supplying vaccine six months after a pandemic starts, and of producing enough vaccine for a small fraction of the world population.
"In order to even consider the possibility of reducing the animal reservoir of an emerging pandemic virus,
or years after they are collected hardly the swift turnaround of a pandemic alert system.""Could we pick up a mutation in real time
and stop a pandemic? asks Capua.""Not with the surveillance we have now. Source: Genbankmoreover, if H5n1 surveillance in poultry is poor,
H5n1 infections in pigs are uncommon and cause only mild illness, creating little economic incentive to monitor them4.
Yet pigs are a likely source of a human pandemic H5n1 virus because they are susceptible to both human
But even if a candidate pandemic H5n1 virus was detected in poultry, culling flocks to eliminate it would be no mean feat.
H5n1 is far from being the only flu virus that poses a pandemic threat. But he believes that more extensive genetic surveillance could eventually pay off."
which are used in humans to treat a range of infections, including pneumonia. On 4 Â January, the agency said that it would prohibit certain uses of cephalosporins in farm animals including cattle, pigs, chickens and turkeys,
"If we want to protect large animals from these infections, then we have to test vaccines in them,
Timely global surveillance of animal flu viruses is crucial not just for identifying pandemic threats,
because"H5n1 is not the sole pandemic candidate, and low pathogenic viruses are just as likely, if not more likely,
to become pandemic. The number of avian flu sequences deposited in the database skyrocketed between 2003 and 2010,
Yet pigs are a serious pandemic risk: they can be infected co with both human and avian flu strains,
the emergence of pandemic strains such as the 2009 H1n1 pandemic virus. The world is home to some 1 billion domestic pigs, almost half
The pandemic risk posed by pigs has risen also since 2009. The 2009 pandemic H1n1 virus,
which is now endemic in pigs, is unusual in that it contains the triple reassortant internal gene (TRIG) cassette,
a highly conserved set of six genes that allows the virus to swap genes with flu viruses from other species much more freely than the seasonal H1n1 that circulated before 2009 (see Pandemic 2009 H1n1 virus gives wings to avian flu).
but"we are noting lots of reassortment between the pandemic virus and endemic swine viruses, says Peiris.
or report, outbreaks so that they can claim they are free of infection and so avoid trade problems.
and is hoping to examine how social rank affects the macaques'susceptibility to infection
Million-year-old ash hints at origins of cookinggreatstock Photographic Library/Alamythe plant and animal ash was found thirty metres inside the Wonderwerk Cave beyond the reach of a lightning strike.
Researchers tested milk from dairy herds across England and Wales for antibodies against F. hepatica, an indication of infection,
If they assumed that a fluke infection inhibited btb detection, they achieved a closer match between the model and actual btb detection rates.
questions whether the liver fluke hides infections.""Cattle carcasses are inspected in abattoirs and we would see evidence of TB in the slaughtered animals
and new infection sites crop up long distances from existing hotspots. Eradicating liver fluke could increase the sensitivity of the skin test
Farmers say it is impossible to avoid growing GM soya because of contamination, and in April they won a challenge in the state of Rio grande do Sul,
and the United kingdom, are hotspots of emerging zoonotic infections, such as avian influenza.""Zoonoses present a major threat to human and animal health.
or past infection with bacterial food-borne disease. The latest research will help direct efforts
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