Eight million tonnes of plastics enter the oceans every year, much of which has accumulated in five giant garbage patches around the planet, according to a new study.  CAROLINE POWER PHOTOGRAPHY/AFP/File / Handout

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Evidence that the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is rapidly accumulating plastic

phys.com - by Patrick Galey And Marlowe Hood - March 22, 2018

The vast dump of plastic waste swirling in the Pacific ocean is now bigger than France, Germany and Spain combined -- far larger than previously feared -- and is growing rapidly, a study published Thursday warned.

Researchers based in the Netherlands used a fleet of boats and aircraft to scan the immense accumulation of bottles, containers, fishing nets and microparticles known as the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" (GPGP) and found an astonishing build-up of plastic waste.

"We found about 80,000 tonnes of buoyant plastic currently in the GPGP," Laurent Lebreton, lead author of the study published in the journal Scientific Reports, told AFP.

(CLICK HERE - READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg apologized for the Cambridge Analytica scandal with ads in multiple US and British newspapers Sunday.  JENNY KANE/ASSOCIATED PRESS

usatoday.com - by Marco della Cava - March 25, 2018

As Facebook continues to buffet winds of criticism, its founder took out full page ads in U.S. and British newspapers Sunday to apologize to consumers for not properly securing their personal data.

"This was a breach of trust, and I'm sorry we didn't do more at the time," Mark Zuckerberg said in the signed ad, which was published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and six British papers. "We have a responsibility to protect your information. If we can't, we don't deserve it."

The ad refers to the misuse of 50 million Facebook profiles, which were mined through an app created by a Cambridge University professor and then sold, in violation of Facebook's terms of service, to Cambridge Analytica, a company that used the profiles to create election ad-targeting tools for the campaign to elect Donald Trump.

A dead Bodó fish in front of stranded floating houses on the bed of Negro River, a major tributary of the Amazon River, during a drought in 2015. Photograph: Raphael Alves/AFP/Getty Images

CLICK HERE - ipbes - Biodiversity and Nature’s Contributions Continue Dangerous Decline, Scientists Warn

Unsustainable exploitation of the natural world threatens food and water security of billions of people, major UN-backed biodiversity study reveals

theguardian.com - by Jonathan Watts - March 23, 2018

Human destruction of nature is rapidly eroding the world’s capacity to provide food, water and security to billions of people, according to the most comprehensive biodiversity study in more than a decade.

Such is the rate of decline that the risks posed by biodiversity loss should be considered on the same scale as those of climate change, noted the authors of the UN-backed report, which was released in Medellin, Colombia on Friday.

#Groundswell report out now! By 2050 #ClimateChange could force more than 140 million people in three densely populated regions of the world to move within their countries. #Learn more→https://t.co/9w3O0OY9Cv pic.twitter.com/acf9xTMWbu

— World Bank (@WorldBank) March 19, 2018

https://twitter.com/WorldBank/status/975811536135557120?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Ftime.com%2F5206716%2Fworld-bank-climate-change-internal-migration%2F&tfw_site=TIME

An expanding list of news resources on Zika virus . . .

CLICK HERE - CDC - Zika Virus - Case Counts in the US

CLICK HERE - DAILY ZIKA UPDATES - Florida Department of Health

CLICK HERE - Texas Department of State Health Services - Zika in Texas - http://www.texaszika.org

CLICK HERE - Zika circulates among wild animals in the Americas, making eradication nearly impossible - November 1, 2018

CLICK HERE - Zika Linked to a Spike in Birth Defects in the U.S. - January 26, 2018

CLICK HERE - Researchers identified three new mosquito carriers of Zika virus in Mexico and say all three are potential vectors of the disease - January 16, 2018

CLICK HERE - U.S. Study Sheds Light on How Zika Causes Nerve Disorder - December 13, 2017

In Humacao, a city on the eastern coast just north of where Hurricane Maria’s eye passed, power poles and lines still litter the ground in some areas. PHOTO: ARIAN CAMPO-FLORES/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Six months after Hurricane Maria, as many as 7,000 of the island’s small businesses remain closed

wsj.com - by Arian Campo-Flores - March 19, 2018

 . . . Though economic activity in Puerto Rico has picked up in recent months, businesses large and small are struggling. Electricity woes continue to plague the island, where 91% of power generation has been restored but the grid is prone to sudden outages. Insurance money has arrived slowly, with $1.7 billion paid in residential and business claims as of Jan. 31—about 40% of the expected total, according to the island’s Office of the Commissioner of Insurance.

And the market is shrinking as a result of an accelerating exodus of Puerto Ricans fleeing conditions on the island.

(CLICK HERE - READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

This year, the rats that carry Lassa fever may be more numerous, or more likely to harbor the virus.  Photo: Reuters/Stringer

CLICK HERE - reliefweb - Nigeria: Lassa Fever Outbreak

CLICK HERE - WHO - Nigeria - Lassa Fever

science.sciencemag.org - by Leslie Roberts - March 16, 2018

By early January, it was clear something “really, really extraordinary” was going on in Nigeria, says Lorenzo Pomarico of the Alliance for International Medical Action (ALIMA). Cases of Lassa fever, a rare viral hemorrhagic disease, were skyrocketing across the country—more were recorded in the first 2 months of 2018 than in any previous year. Unprepared for a disease that has no vaccines or drugs and kills 20% to 30% of those it sickens, eight health care workers were infected early on and three died. “Something was going very wrong with the outbreak,” Pomarico says.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

With a population of nearly 600,000, the settlement near Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh is the largest refugee camp in the world. Credit United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

More than half a million Rohingya refugees face looming disaster from floods and landslides when the first storms of the monsoon season hit their camp in Bangladesh.

nytimes.com - by SOMINI SENGUPTA and HENRY FOUNTAIN - MARCH 14, 2018

The world’s largest refugee camp, a temporary home to more than half a million people that sprawls precariously across barren hills in southeastern Bangladesh, faces a looming disaster as early as April when the first storms of the monsoon season hit, aid workers warn.

“It’s going to be landslides, flash floods, inundation,” said Tommy Thompson, chief of emergency support and response for the World Food Program. “It’s going to be a very, very challenging wet season. That’s if we don’t have a cyclone.”

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

CLICK HERE - WHO - R&D Blueprint - List of Blueprint priority diseases

telegraph.co.uk - by Alanna Shaikh - March 10, 2018

Over two days in early February, the World Health Organisation (WHO) convened an expert committee at its Geneva headquarters to consider the unthinkable.

The goal was to identify pathogens with the potential to spread and kill millions but for which there are currently no, or insufficient, countermeasures available . . . 

 . . . In addition to eight frightening but familiar diseases including Ebola, Zika, and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), the list included a ninth global threat: Disease X.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

ALSO SEE RELATED ARTICLE HERE - Mysterious 'Disease X' Could Be The Next Deadly Global Epidemic, WHO Warns

globalbiodefense.com - February 22, 2018

CLICK HERE - DARPA - Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3)

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) launched the Pandemic Prevention Platform (P3) program in 2017, with the eventual goal of halting the spread of any infectious disease outbreak before it can escalate into a pandemic . . . 

 . . . In contrast with state-of-the-art medical countermeasures, which typically take many months or even years to develop, produce, distribute, and administer, the envisioned P3 platform would cut response time to weeks and stay within the window of relevance for containing an outbreak.

(CLICK HERE - READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

xinhuanet.com - Editor: Liu - February 23, 2018

CLICK HERE - Dampened STING-Dependent Interferon Activation in Bats

WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 (Xinhua) -- Chinese scientists have identified the secret of bats that harbor highly pathogenic viruses like Ebola, Marburg and SARS coronavirus but do not show clinical signs of disease.

In a paper published on Thursday in the journal Cell Host & Microbe, scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China find that in bats, an antiviral immune pathway called the STING-interferon pathway is dampened, so bats can maintain just enough defense against illness without triggering a heightened immune reaction.

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Ebola virus budding from surface of cells, from a scanning electron micrograph.  Image credits: NIAID

CLICK HERE - The Global Virome Project

insidescience.org - by Benjamin Plackett - February 22, 2018

 . . . In an article published in Science magazine today, Daszak and a group of like-minded scientists described a new initiative, called the Virome project, that would identify and catalogue hundreds of thousands of yet-to-be-discovered viruses found in wild animals.

The team estimates that there are about 1.6 million undiscovered virus types and that somewhere between 631,000-827,000 could potentially spill over into humans. The viruses are found mostly in wild mammals.

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A mural announces anti-Ebola sentiment outside a business in Harper, Liberia.  Brad Wagenaar

CLICK HERE - STUDY - The 2014–2015 Ebola virus disease outbreak and primary healthcare delivery in Liberia: Time-series analyses for 2010–2016

After the 2014 outbreak, the population's needs were often unmet in terms of primary care, mother-child health, and immmunizations.

newsroom.uw.edu - by Ashlie Chandler - February 20, 2018

The 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa rapidly became the deadliest occurrence of the disease — claiming 4,809 lives in Liberia alone.  Now new research from the University of Washington suggests Ebola's collateral effects on that nation's health system likely caused more deaths than Ebola did directly.

The study, published today in PLOS Medicine, found that it only took four months for Liberia to lose between 35 percent and 67 percent of primary health care services after the  Ebola outbreak began.

Zika's blood-sucking predator

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Zika virus–related neurotropic flaviviruses infect human placental explants and cause fetal demise in mice

cnn.com - by Susan Scutti - February 18, 2018

In 2016, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed that the Zika virus caused birth defects in babies born to women who had been infected while pregnant. This was the first mosquito-borne disease known to cause birth defects . . . 

 . . . Now, a study suggests that two viruses that are related to Zika can cause similar birth defects.

West Nile and Powassan viruses caused fetal death in infected pregnant mice, the researchers say.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

CLICK HERE - NEJM - Zika Virus and Birth Defects — Reviewing the Evidence for Causality