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Can South Korea Help the World Beat the Next Pandemic?
As nations around the world emerge from the long and devastating COVID-19 pandemic and reflect on the losses and the way forward, nations around the world, including the United States, could look to South Korea’s near-perfect response as a model for dealing with future public health crises.
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Summer 2022 Saw Thousands of Excess Deaths in England and Wales – Here’s Why That Might Be
The difference between the actual and expected number of deaths recorded, from any cause, is known as the excess deaths. During the first eight weeks of 2022, despite there being 9,110 deaths documented with COVID mentioned on the death certificate in England and Wales, there were 8,001 fewer total deaths than anticipated. However, since April this has flipped. Between April 2 and August 19 (granted, a longer period) there were 12,321 deaths registered with COVID on the death certificate but notably, 21,475 excess deaths. So if COVID accounts for only a little over half of these excess deaths, what may be driving the rest?
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Chronic Lack of Investment in Public Health Puts Americans’ Lives, Livelihoods at Risk
COVID-19 emergency funding was critical to initial pandemic response but did not address nation’s long-standing underinvestment in public health; $4.5 billion in annual infrastructure funding is needed.
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Public Health Tool Predicts Effects of a Pandemic and Mitigation Efforts
Epidemiologists and public health officials have a new predictive tool to analyze the course of pandemics.
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Did Sweden’s Controversial COVID Strategy Pay Off? In Many Ways It Did – but It Let the Elderly Down
Sweden’s approach to COVID was controversial, with some calling it “the Swedish experiment.” But almost two-and-a-half years after the pandemic began, what can we say today about the outcomes of this “experiment”?
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Nuclear War Would Cause Global Famine
More than 5 billion people would die of hunger following a full-scale nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia, according to a global study that estimates post-conflict crop production. Even a regional nuclear conflict would devastate crop production.
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New Test May Predict Covid-19 Immunity
The paper test measures the level of neutralizing antibodies in a blood sample and could help people decide what protections they should take against infection.
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Rise of Precision Agriculture Exposes Food System to New Threats
Farmers are adopting precision agriculture, using data collected by GPS, satellite imagery, internet-connected sensors and other technologies to farm more efficiently. These practices could help increase crop yields and reduce costs, but the technology behind the practices is creating opportunities for extremists, terrorists and adversarial governments to attack farming machinery, with the aim of disrupting food production.
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Growing the Impacts of Climate-Smart Agriculture
A range of ‘climate-smart’ farming practices have the potential to lower that impact, and also help sequester carbon dioxide emitted by other parts of the economy. For example, planting cover crops in between plantings of cash crops can absorb CO2 into the soil, among other benefits. However, cover crops and other climate-smart practices aren’t yet the norm.
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How Polio Crept Back into the U.S.
U.S. public health agencies generally don’t test wastewater for signs of polio. That may have given the virus time to circulate silently before it paralyzed a New York man.
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Origins of Unconventional War
Flamethrowers, poison gases, incendiary bombs, the large-scale spreading of disease: are these terrifying agents of warfare modern inventions? Not by a long shot. Societies around the world have used biological and chemical weapons for thousands of years. “One sobering result of writing this book is the realization that there was no time or place when biological weapons were unthinkable,” says Adrienne Mayor, the author of a new book on the subject.
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For Advance Drought Warning, Look to the Plants
Among the extreme weather impacts resulting from climate change, drought is a growing problem around the globe, leading to frequent wildfires, threats to water resources, and greater food insecurity. Researchers find signals in vegetation can help forecast devastating ‘flash’ droughts.
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Study Highlights Community Spread of Superbugs
New US surveillance data indicate that infections caused by multidrug-resistant bacterial pathogens are moving beyond the healthcare setting.
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Researchers Launch Global Dashboard to Track Invasive Mosquitoes Carrying Deadly Diseases
To combat the ongoing threat of mosquito-borne diseases worldwide, researchers have launched a mosquito-tracking dashboard driven by citizen science – a scalable solution proven effective in a recent study.
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Flood Maps Show U.S. Vastly Underestimates Contamination Risk at Old Industrial Sites
Floodwaters are a growing risk for many American cities, threatening to displace not only people and housing but also the land-based pollution left behind by earlier industrial activities. For communities near these sites, the flooding of contaminated land is worrisome because it threatens to compromise common pollution containment methods, such as capping contaminated land with clean soil. It can also transport legacy contaminants into surrounding soils and waterways, putting the health and safety of urban ecosystems and residents at risk.
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More headlines
The long view
Mathematical Models Tackle Covid Infection Dynamics
Even years after the emergence of the COVID-19 global pandemic, the workings of SARS-CoV-2 infection inside the human body, including the early activity of the virus and the role of the body’s immune response, has proved difficult to precisely ascertain.