Germany is still recovering from one of the world’s worst outbreaks of enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli, which as of 18 June had sickened more than 3,200 people and caused 39 deaths¹. The unusually deadly bacteria moved undetected through the food supply from livestock to agriculture to the dinner table, and the response to the outbreak was branded slow and inefficient by physicians and scientists (see ‘Microbe outbreak panics Europe‘).

Now a group of health professionals assembled by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, has called for biosurveillance efforts in the United States and worldwide to be streamlined to help recognize and respond to threats quickly.

“We are trying to create an international immune system, a system that has the capacity to recognize abnormalities,” says Ian Lipkin, co-chair of the National Biosurveillance Advisory Subcommittee (NBAS) and director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, New York.

Read at Nature News

As she took a drag out of her pipe, she surveyed the scene from atop the building.  The Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn lay before her—multi-story brown housing with off-white blankets stuffed into rectangular window panes; gray cement roads filled with old model SUVs; the yard of a pipe-manufacturing plant; a metal salvage yard with a three-storey-tall pile of rusted hubcaps and the backbones of schoolroom chairs; black polythene bags caught in the barbed wire fences; faded graffiti on the walls; a memoriam to a young man named “Peanut Head”.

Her hair was tightly tied back and ended in a bunch of small blonde curls sticking up around the top of her head like a crown.  Her eyes were cyan-blue, big and glazed.  Her lashes were long—she had pretty eyes.  They helped her turn tricks in the primarily non-white neighborhood.  They got her attention from the cops—hefty white men who hung out two to a block on street corners.  When they saw an unkempt white girl walking down the street, they knew she was either an addict or a prostitute.

Amy was both.  She wanted to be so much more, but she didn’t know how.  She was stuck between her past, and the lack of a future.  Crack, and sometimes dope, and sometimes whatever she could get—angel dust, tranquilizers—helped her turn away from a past of sexual abuse she said she had suffered at the hands of her older brother in her middle-class duplex home in Vermont.

When the cops moved away, the dealers occupied the same corners—two or three outside La Crema Deli or the Dominican restaurant.  They knew her, too.

They knew she’ll “bust a head”—“bust head” is the new term for a “crack head because they will meaning service men for cheap—for $20 or a crack hit.  Especially when she was on a binge.  They tempted her.

“Hey, you want something?”

Sometimes, she ignored them, shouting, “Leave me alone.”

Most times, she took whatever drug or money was offered.  With her income she supported Eric Irizarry, 33 (or “Eddie Machete”), her boyfriend of seven years, and their landlord—a phantom-like man who shared his living space with them for $10 a day and whatever amount of crack she could give him.  She didn’t like sharing, but didn’t have much of a choice—it was better than being homeless.

She shared her crack pipe; she used to share her needles when she had done heroin.  She didn’t have HIV despite sharing a barely-sterilized needle with a HIV-positive man.

She sat at the edge of the roof, staring down, cocaine smoke rising around her. She had not been home in three days.  She was in the middle of a crack binge, selling her body to satisfy the cravings of her mind.

Four days ago, she hadn’t smoked crack for a few days in a row.  If she didn’t smoke in the morning, she’d be clean for the entire day.  But Eddie had become impatient for money.  The next day, he’d placed a crack pipe below her nose and woken her up.  She’d smelled the drug and had to smoke.  Then she’d left in search of highs bigger than the previous hit.

She knew she shouldn’t be with him, but she had nobody else.  And ultimately, using drugs was her choice. She dragged him down as well, tempting him when he tried to stay clean.  They dragged each other down.

Amy Keenan is one of approximately 2.1 million current users of cocaine aged 12 and older in America, and 8.5 million lifetime users in 2007, a number three times larger than the number of heroin injectors[1] [2].  Crack cocaine is widely available on the streets and is cheap.  Although its popularity among the younger generation has declined since the late 1980s, about 350,000 people aged 12 and older smoked it for the first time in 2007.[3] And research has revealed that consistent users of crack persist with their addiction for a decade or longer.[4]

[2] Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Office of Applied Studies (2008). Results from the 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: National Findings (NSDUH Series H-34, DHHS Publication No. SMA 08-4343). Rockville, MD: http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/nsduh/2k7nsduh/2k7Results.cfm#TOC

[3] Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Office of Applied Studies (2008). Results from the 2007 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: National Findings (NSDUH Series H-34, DHHS Publication No. SMA 08-4343). Rockville, MD: http://www.oas.samhsa.gov/NSDUH/2k7NSDUH/tabs/Sect8peTabs1to42.htm#Tab8.30A

[4] Falck, R. S., Wang, J., & Carlson, R. G. (2007). Crack cocaine trajectories among users in a midwestern American city . Addiction , 102, 1421-1431.

Parts of Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia and eastern Uganda are most affected. The U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) estimates that 8.4 million people are in need of food aid in the region, according to spokesman David Orr. Thousands of livestock have already died in Kenya and Ethiopia from animal diseases associated with the drought. The severity this year will depend on the rainy season between March and May.

A drought for the record books

Unlike more instantaneous natural disasters such as earthquakes, drought progresses slowly like a drumbeat. There is an apex, usually around the ninth month when the numbers of cattle dying rises drastically. The numbers depend on how poor the rainfall is, and meteorologists have so far predicted below-average rainfall for 2011 in eastern parts of the Horn.

Predictions of the current drought depend on ocean temperatures. A La Niña episode, caused by cooling ocean surface temperatures, began in the central Pacific Ocean in July 2010. Temperatures lowered by 1.5 to 1.6 degrees Celsius, changing ocean and atmospheric circulation patterns.

In historical terms, this episode has been among the strongest in a century, according to the World Meteorological Agency. The system unleashed massive flooding in Australia and Southeast Asia. In East Africa, it caused a dry spell between October and December 2010. It was the driest short rain season in 30 years.

“It is too early to say yet, although the general view is [the rains] look like being quite poor in certain parts of Somalia and Ethiopia,” said Orr. “Combined with conflict and rising food prices in Somalia, this could be particularly serious in that country.”

The WFP is continuing its normal operations of providing a food basket of cereals to the regions but is underfunded by 56 percent for the April to September period, Orr said.

Read at Greenwire/NYT

Funding gap persists as agencies and organizations attempt to wipe out the tenacious virus.

Some 99% of wild poliovirus has been eradicated, but it clings on in a few places. The last endemic hot spots are the conflict-ridden front lines of Pakistan and Afghanistan, areas of India and Nigeria — and governments and charities are scrambling to eliminate it entirely.

Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder and co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation headquartered in Seattle, Washington, announced in his annual letter yesterday his commitment to eradicate polio by 2012, by giving the vaccine to all children under five in poor countries. The initiative is led by the Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), which includes among other organizations Rotary International, a non-profit foundation headquartered in Evanston, Illinois.

Nature examines the challenges that remain before the virus can be wiped out.

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U.S. EPA says it is OK for humans to take in up to 50 micrograms of BPA per kilogram of body weight each day. The new study, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, suggests that we are exposed to at least eight times that amount every day.

“Our data raise grave concern that regulatory agencies have grossly underestimated current human exposure levels,” states the study.

The study also gives the first experimental support that some BPA is likely cleared at similar rates in mice, monkeys and humans, making it possible to extrapolate health studies in mice to humans.

Despite decades of research, questions about BPA have lingered and recently become politicized. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) hopes to add an amendment to the “FDA Food Safety Modernization Act,” currently under consideration in the Senate, banning the chemical from children’s food and drink packaging. Republicans and industry representatives have been averse, saying that research has not shown conclusively that the chemical is harmful.

Hormones are essential during development and can determine, among other things, a child’s gender. BPA, since it mimics estrogen, is an “endocrine disrupter,” according to Thomas Zoeller, a biology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. And amazingly, BPA has the ability to bind to not one, but three receptors — the estrogen, the male hormone and the thyroid hormone receptors, Zoeller said.

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The Environmental Justice Strategic Enforcement Assessment Tool uses a complex combination of census data, a respiratory hazard index, poverty levels, toxic emissions, infant mortality, an index of documented pollution events and other such numbers to assign a score to a geographical area.

The end result will be a national database that will identify small tracts of people as unfairly affected over the years. Officials can take the score into consideration while making land-use and permit decisions, reducing chances of human judgment errors. Officials stressed that the tool was only a starting point, and other information would also be used to make decisions.

The tool is being developed to assist the agency in its quest to help officials take into account concerns of minorities, low-income and indigenous communities while they prepare rules, issue permits and seek compliance. The interim guidance on the issue, released Monday, will go for assessment to the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC), a council put together by EPA in 1992 to address environmental justice issues.

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The upsurge is not unexpected. Experts say more than half the world’s population will be at risk by 2085 because of greater urbanization, global travel and climate change. Over the past 30 years, a global outcry against using the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or DDT, has led to the resurgence of the mosquito, a voracious consumer of human blood and carrier of infectious disease.

Epidemics have become routine in Latin America, a continent on the verge of becoming highly endemic. Outbreaks are today raging in Brazil, Guatemala and other nations. Thailand, within a week of its annual dengue season this year, has already reported 18,000 cases and 20 deaths, according to the Ministry of Public Health.

Their report, released in Oklahoma City today, is the first attempt to put numbers on the widely held belief that high-speed rail can stimulate local economies and act as a driver of growth. The Obama administration has invested $8 billion in federal stimulus money to create 13 high-speed rail corridors.

The benefits of traveling between 110 and 220 miles per hour will mean better connectivity, shorter travel times and new development around train stations, according to the report. The changes will create 150,000 new jobs and some $19 billion in new businesses by 2035.

Read More

In nature, that process takes millions of years. A small group of cross-disciplinary microbiologists with their feet both in the oil industry and academic geochemistry wants to speed up the work. They are trying to get these bugs to break down carbon much faster to produce a steady supply of commercial natural gas, and to enhance the recovery of crude.

Interest in using microbes that grow naturally in oil fields, coal beds and shale deposits is growing, according to a group of industry insiders at the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) 2010 convention last week in Chicago.

“We’ve garnered the attention of large oil and gas producers around the world,” said Mark Finkelstein, vice-president of science at Colorado-based Luca Technologies. “The recent emphasis on climate change and natural gas bodes well for our technology.”

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Washington, DC–The United States needs to become the leader in the international arena of climate change politics and economics, said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“Jobs are going to go by the wayside if we do not get in there; it is a political and economic issue,” she said in her testimony defending her department’s fiscal 2011 budget request. She called on Congress to recognize the strategic importance of taking the initiative on climate change.

The State Department needs $646 million to promote the United States as a leader in green technologies, she said, and added that the clean-energy market is set to be captured by other countries, especially China. The “intellectual capital of the world” and the originator of most of this technology should not be left behind in this clean-energy economy, she said.

Clinton also praised U.S. efforts at Copenhagen, especially President Obama’s decision to barge into a secret meeting being held by China, India, South Africa and Brazil to “figure out how to avoid tough questions.” The end result of that was the Copenhagen Accord, she said.

Copenhagen is the first time after World War II that developed and developing nations have taken equal responsibility for their emissions, she said.

“The world wants the United States to lead; they look to us as the world’s oldest democracy,” she said.

The 2011 budget has a 38 percent increase in funding to address climate change, a move that Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) lauded in his opening comments.

Developed nations have agreed to give $30 billion through 2012 to developing nations to help with their climate change efforts.

“Now we face the even tougher challenge of matching our words with action,” said Kerry.

The Obama administration has requested $1.4 billion for climate-related diplomacy efforts as part of a $58.5 billion budget for the State Department. This is just 1.4 percent of the overall 2011 budget.

In a hearing sparsely attended by the Republican side, ranking member Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) touched lightly on the climate change issue.

“Wasted economic gains from attainable energy efficiencies are a drag on economic recovery,” he said. “We are also concerned about the possible crises that could occur if dramatic climate change takes hold.”