Situation Report

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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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.

FILE PHOTO: Uninhabitable apartments, in danger of collapsing into the Pacific Ocean, line Esplanade Ave. in Pacifica, California January 26, 2016. REUTERS/Noah Berger/File Photo

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Committed sea-level rise under the Paris Agreement and the legacy of delayed mitigation action

reuters.com - Alister Doyle - February 20, 2018

Sea levels will rise between 0.7 and 1.2 meters (27-47 inches) in the next two centuries even if governments end the fossil fuel era as promised under the Paris climate agreement, scientists said on Tuesday.

Early action to cut greenhouse gas emissions would limit the long-term rise, driven by a thaw of ice from Greenland to Antarctica that will re-draw global coastlines, a German-led team wrote in the journal Nature Communications . . .

 . . . By 2300, the report projected that sea levels would gain by 0.7-1.2 meters, even if almost 200 nations fully meet goals under the 2015 Paris Agreement, which include cutting greenhouse gas emissions to net zero in the second half of this century . . . 

CLICK HERE - RESEARCH - STUDY - Unprecedented climate events: Historical changes, aspirational targets, and national commitments

sciencedaily.com - by Stanford University - Taylor Kubota - February 14, 2018

The individual commitments made by parties of the United Nations Paris Agreement are not enough to fulfill the agreement's overall goal of limiting global temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The difference between the U.N. goal and the actual country commitments is a mere 1 C, which may seem negligible. But a study from Stanford University, published Feb. 14 in Science Advances, finds that even that 1-degree difference could increase the likelihood of extreme weather.

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ALSO SEE RELATED ARTICLE HERE - Scientists Just Issued a Grim New Warning on Climate Change: 'We Are Not Prepared'