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What A Week It Was: Apocadocuments from
View By Scenario:
Species Collapse:(2)
Plague/Virus:(3)
Climate Chaos:(11)
Resource Depletion: (2)
Biology Breach:(8)
Recovery:(5)
This Week's Top Ten Very Scary Tags:
anthropogenic change  ~ carbon emissions  ~ airborne pollutants  ~ health impacts  ~ short-term thinking  ~ global warming  ~ economic myopia  ~ capitalist greed  ~ deniers  ~ smart policy  ~ corporate malfeasance  



ApocaDocuments (5) matching "health impacts" from this week
[see full week] ~ [see all stories tagged "health impacts"]
Fri, Jan 14, 2011
from New Scientist:
Prion disease can spread through air
You catch flu by inhaling germs - now it seems you can catch prion diseases that way too. Prions are misshapen proteins that cause brain degeneration in conditions such as mad cow disease and scrapie in animals, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. They can get into you if you eat infected meat or receive infected blood, but it was thought they couldn't spread through air. Now Adriano Aguzzi of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich reports that mice exposed for 10 minutes to aerosols containing as little as 2.5 per cent brain tissue from mice with scrapie all developed the disease within months. The prions didn't need processing by the immune system first, as some other research has suggested, but entered the brain directly through nasal nerves. "We were amazed at how efficiently they spread," says Aguzzi. He warns that this doesn't mean animals or people with prion diseases actually transmit them through the air: there have been no unexplained cases of disease transmission which suggested this. But workers in mills that process potentially infected carcasses may need more respiratory protection. ...


Another vector just itchin' for optimization by evolution!

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Thu, Jan 13, 2011
from Rice, via EurekAlert:
Virus killer gets supercharged on the cheap
A simple technique to make a common virus-killing material significantly more effective is a breakthrough from the Rice University labs of Andrew Barron and Qilin Li. Rather than trying to turn the process into profit, the researchers have put it into the public domain. They hope wide adoption will save time, money and perhaps even lives.... adding silicone to titanium dioxide, a common disinfectant, dramatically increases its ability to degrade aerosol- and water-borne viruses.... "We chose the Yangtze River as our baseline for testing, because it's considered the most polluted river in the world, with the highest viral content," he said. "Even at that level of viral contamination, we're getting complete destruction of the viruses in water that matches the level of pollution in the Yangtze." Using a smaller amount of treated P25 takes longer but works just as well, he said. "Either way, it's green and it's cheap." ...


"Green and cheap" is no way to restart the economy.

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Thu, Jan 13, 2011
from Montreal Gazette:
Quebec forest fires cast wide pall
When lightning sparks a fire in a Quebec forest, people living as far as 1,000 kilometres away can end up breathing polluted air. A new study has found air pollution levels in northern New York state jumped last summer as more than 50 forest fires burned around La Tuque, about 300 kilometres northeast of Montreal. Researchers at Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y., found the amount of fine particulate matter, one component of air pollution, jumped to 18 times its normal level because of smoke blown south from Quebec. Fine particulate matter is about one-30th the diameter of a human hair, and is linked to premature death from heart and lung disease, as well as heart attacks, respiratory problems, asthma attacks and bronchiolitis. ...


Keep your bloody Canadian smoke out of my airspace!

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Thu, Jan 13, 2011
from New York Times:
Stress, Pollution and Poverty: A Vicious Cycle?
The Environmental Protection Agency has awarded $7 million in grants to researchers to study the cumulative health impact of pollutants like mercury and lead and social factors like stress and poor nutrition in several low-income communities, the agency said Tuesday... But a growing body of research suggests that cumulative exposure to multiple pollutants, and nonchemical factors like stress, poverty and poor diet, can amplify the negative effects of a single toxic substance. ...


I think we should pay more attention to rich people.

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Tue, Jan 11, 2011
from McClatchy Newspapers:
Climate change reveals disease as national security threat
One of the most worrisome national security threats of climate change is the spread of disease, among both people and animals, U.S. intelligence and health officials say. But more than a decade after such concerns were first raised by U.S. intelligence agencies, significant gaps remain in the health surveillance and response network -- not just in developing nations, but in the United States as well, according to those officials and a review of federal documents and reports. And those gaps, they say, undermine the ability of the U.S. and world health officials to respond to disease outbreaks before they become national security threats. ...


I bet we don't understand the language.

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