Public health

  • Making clean drinking water universally available “achievable”

    More than 780 million people around the world still do not have safe and reliable drinking water. The problem of providing clean water is most acute in developing countries, particularly in Africa, where creaking infrastructures struggle to keep pace with fast-growing urban populations; in rural areas, millions of water pumps stand unused waiting to be repaired.

  • Toxic threats: More mercury released to the environment

    Mercury, especially in the form of methylmercury, is an extremely toxic chemical to all life forms. It occurs both naturally and as the result of human activities. A majority of mercury releases to the environment presently are atmosphere emissions from human activities, and reemissions of previously deposited mercury from soils and the oceans. The largest sources of man-made mercury emissions are small-scale gold mining and burning coal for electrical generation.

    • University of Florida Clinical Toxicology Online Graduate Course. Chemical Weapons of Mass Destruction. Arm yourself with knowledge.
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  • Universal flu vaccine within sight

    Researchers asked volunteers to donate blood samples just as the swine flu pandemic was getting underway and report any symptoms they experienced over the next two flu seasons. They found that those who avoided severe illness had more CD8 T cells, a type of virus-killing immune cell, in their blood at the start of the pandemic. The researchers believe a vaccine that stimulates the body to produce more of these cells could be effective at preventing flu viruses, including new strains that cross into humans from birds and pigs, from causing serious disease.

  • Children living close to nuclear power plants do not have higher risk of developing leukemia

    Young children who live near nuclear power plants do not have a greater risk of developing childhood leukemia or non-Hodgkin Lymphoma according to new research. Researchers conducted a study of almost 10,000 children under five years of age who were diagnosed with leukemia or similar cancers in Britain between 1962 and 2007. The scientists measured the distance from the nearest nuclear power plant both at birth and when diagnosed with childhood leukemia or non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and found that there was no apparent extra risk living near a nuclear power plant.

  • Sewage treatment removes widely used home and garden insecticides from wastewater

    Even though sewage treatment plants are not designed to remove tiny amounts of pesticides, they do an excellent job of dealing with the most widely used family of home and garden insecticides, scientists reported. The use of pyrethrins, derived from chrysanthemum flowers, and the related synthetic pyrethroids, has been on the increase during the last decade. Researchers found that advanced sewage treatment reduced the levels of pyrethroids by more than 97 percent.

  • Making people invisible to mosquitoes

    Mosquitoes are more deadly to humans than any other animal. Their bites transmit malaria and other diseases that kill an estimated one million people around the world each year. In the United States, mosquitoes spread rare types of encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain. They also transmit heartworms to pet dogs and cats. Scientists described discovery of substances that occur naturally on human skin and block mosquitoes’ ability to smell and target their victims – in effect, offering people, pets, and livestock with an invisibility cloak against these blood-sucking insects.

  • Wildfires to worsen with climate change

    Air quality has vastly improved over much of the United States in the past forty years as a result of government efforts to regulate emissions. Gradual climate change may contribute in the coming years to increases in significant, disruptive events like severe storms, floods, and wildfires. A Harvard model predicts wildfire seasons by 2050 will be three weeks longer, up to twice as smoky, and will burn a wider area in the western United States. These increasing wildfires may erase some of the progress made on air quality.

  • Fukushima radioactive plume to reach U.S. next year

    The radioactive ocean plume from the 2011 Fukushima nuclear plant disaster will reach the shores of the United States within three years from the date of the incident, but is likely to be harmless, according to a new study. While atmospheric radiation was detected on the U.S. west coast within days of the incident, the radioactive particles in the ocean plume take considerably longer to travel the same distance.

  • Irradiated mosquitoes provide malaria vaccine

    A new malaria vaccine is derived from mosquitoes that have been irradiated but not killed. The radiation critically weakens the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, which is extracted from the insects’ salivary glands and administered intravenously to subjects.

  • Rapid response, imaging of injuries aided Boston Marathon bombing victims

    According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), bombing survivors have the highest incidence of injury to soft tissue and musculoskeletal systems with the most extreme injury being traumatic amputation, which is reported in up to 3 percent of cases. The Boston Marathon bombings resulted in three fatalities and 264 casualties, with the most severe injuries involving lower extremities of those located closest to the blasts. Blast injuries within civilian populations are rare in the United States, so when they do occur they challenge the medical community rapidly to respond to concurrent evaluation and treatment of many victims.

  • Drones help kill bugs dead

    The Florida Keys Mosquito Control District is considering using a drone to spot shallow-water pools where mosquitoes breed along the Keys. The 2.2-pound, 2.5-foot-long drone would use infrared cameras to locate the shallow pools and allow the district rapidly to treat those areas with larvicide.

  • U.S. radiation exposure guidelines based on unvalidated assumptions: toxicologist

    In the 1950s regulators came to adopt the linear no threshold (LNT) dose-response approach to ionizing radiation exposure, which was later generalized to chemical carcinogen risk assessment. A UMass Amherst toxicologist now offers further evidence to support his earlier assertions that two geneticists deliberately suppressed evidence to prevent the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) from considering an alternative, threshold model, for which there was experimental support. “This isn’t an academic debate; it’s practical, because all of our rules about chemical and low-level radiation are based on unvalidated assumptions and scientific panel decisions made without sound evidence,” the toxicologist says.

  • Bacteria in drinking water are essential to keeping it clean

    Researchers point the way to more sophisticated and targeted methods of ensuring our drinking water remains safe to drink, while still reducing the need for chemical treatments and identifying potential hazards more quickly.

  • In arid regions, irrigation can increase malaria risk for a decade

    Malaria risk in arid regions often rises when irrigation is introduced, due to increased amounts of standing water that serve as mosquito breeding sites. Globally, the number of people at risk of contracting malaria due to proximity to irrigation canals and related infrastructure has been estimated at 800 million, which represents about 12 percent of the global malaria burden. New irrigation systems in arid regions benefit farmers but can increase the local malaria risk for more than a decade — which is longer than previously believed — despite intensive and costly use of insecticides, a new University of Michigan-led study in northwest India concludes.

  • Groundwater in Vietnam threatened by a new source of arsenic

    In Southern Asia, an estimated 100 million people have been exposed to risks from groundwater contaminated with naturally occurring arsenic. The tainted water, used for drinking, agriculture, and industry, has resulted in a variety of serious health risks, including cancer. “Dig deep” to avoid naturally occurring arsenic contamination has been promoted as an answer to obtaining safe water in South Asia, but arsenic has been found in numerous deep wells drilled in the Mekong Delta region of southern Vietnam.