• Poison: Chasing the Antidote

    While targeted chemical attacks on civilians tend to make headlines, the most common poisoning reports in the United States are from accidental exposure to household chemicals such as insect sprays, cleaning solutions or improperly washed fruit or vegetables. In any case, the remedy is a fast-acting, poison-chasing drug compound, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory says it is on the forefront developing a new generation of life-saving antidotes.

  • Election Flexibility Needed to Address Pandemic Safety Concerns

    The COVID-19 pandemic has presented a severe threat to state election plans in 2020. To conduct an election during the COVID-19 pandemic, states need registration and voting options that minimize direct personal contact and that reduce crowds and common access to high-touch surfaces.

  • Nuclear Threats Are Increasing – Here’s How the U.S. Should Prepare for a Nuclear Event

    On the 75th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some may like to think the threat from nuclear weapons has receded. But there are clear signs of a growing nuclear arms race and that the U.S. is not very well-prepared for nuclear and radiological events. Despite the gloomy prospects of health outcomes of any large-scale nuclear event common in the minds of many, there are a number of concrete steps the U.S. and other countries can take to prepare. It’s our obligation to respond.

  • Preparing to Clean Up Following an Anthrax Attack

    The microorganism that causes anthrax, the bacterium Bacillus anthracis, has infected people and animals since ancient times. Anthrax is one of the most likely agents to be used in a biological attack, because the anthrax bacteria exist in the natural environment, can be easily disguised in powders, sprays, food or water, and have been previously used as a biological warfare agent.

  • Google Searches During Pandemic: Hints of Future Increase in Suicide

    U.S. Google searches for information about financial difficulties and disaster relief increased sharply in March and April compared with pre-pandemic times, while Googling related to suicide decreased. Because previous research has shown that financial distress is strongly linked to suicide mortality, the researchers fear that the increase may predict a future increase in deaths from suicide.

  • COVID-19: Millions Face Severe Food Insecurity in Latin America, Caribbean

    The socio-economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America and the Caribbean could potentially leave around 14 million vulnerable people in severe food insecurity this year, warranting urgent attention to save lives, according to projections by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). The estimate suggests that an additional 10 million people could be pushed into poverty and hunger in 11 countries in the region, including the small island developing states in the Caribbean.

  • Face Masks’ Effect on Face Recognition Software

    Now that so many of us are covering our faces to help reduce the spread of COVID-19, how well do face recognition algorithms identify people wearing masks? The answer, according to a preliminary NIST study), is with great difficulty. Algorithms created before the pandemic generally perform less accurately with digitally masked faces.

  • Social Media Users More Likely to Believe False COVID-19 Information

    People who get their news from social media are more likely to have misperceptions about COVID-19. Those that consume more traditional news media have fewer misperceptions and are more likely to follow public health recommendations like social distancing.

  • The (Low) Cost of Preventing the next pandemic

    Thus far, COVID has cost at least $2.6 trillion and may cost ten times this amount. It is the largest global pandemic in 100 years. Six months after emerging, it has killed over 600,000 people and is having a major impact on the global economy. “How much would it cost to prevent this happening again? And what are the principal actions that need to be put in place to achieve this?” asks one expert. His research team offers an answer: $30 billion a year.

  • Advancing Biosecurity in the Age of COVID

    The response to COVID-19 has exposed a world that is largely unprepared to deal with emerging and novel biothreats, whether the outbreak is natural or intentional. The Global Health Security Network brought together two biosecurity experts to discuss how current projects to improve global health security can adapt during the pandemic and what changes the world needs to make to improve biosafety and biosecurity.

  • Combating a Pandemic Is 500 Times More Expensive Than Preventing One

    Experts say that the failure to protect tropical rain forests has cost trillions of dollars stemming from the coronavirus pandemic, which has wreaked economic havoc and caused historic levels of unemployment in the United States and around the world. These experts say that significantly reducing transmission of new diseases from tropical forests would cost, globally, between $22.2 and $30.7 billion each year. In stark contrast, they found that the COVID-19 pandemic will likely end up costing between $8.1 and $15.8 trillion globally—roughly 500 times as costly as what it would take to invest in proposed preventive measures.

  • How the Warsaw Ghetto Beat Typhus

    In 1941, the Nazi forces in Poland crammed more than 450,000 inmates into a confined 3.4 km2 area known as the Warsaw Ghetto. The conditions were wretched, and the level of sanitation and hygiene appalling. As many as 120,000 ghetto inmates were infected by Typhus, with up to 30,000 dying directly from it – but in October 1941, as a harsh winter was beginning and just as Typhus rates would be expected to skyrocket, the epidemic curve suddenly and unexpectedly nose-dived to extinction. At the time, many thought it was a miracle or irrational. Now, scientists explain how it was done. “The tragedy, of course,” says the lead researcher, “is that almost all of those lives saved through these sacrifices, discipline and community programs would soon end in extermination at the Nazi death camps.”

  • The Science Behind the Alternatives to Lockdowns

    Four leading Israeli researcher argue that a correct reading of the Swedish experiment of a more relaxed approach shows that, despite early localized setbacks, it has been a success – and its success helps explode the three myths which have led governments around the world to impose unnecessary lockdowns. Sarah Knapton writes that an official U.K. government report says that more than 200,000 people could die from the impact of lockdown. Robert Peston writes that the cost of COVID-19 in the U.K. was unnecessarily high, and Yoon K. Loke and Carl Heneghan write that in the U.K., the number of COVID-19-related deaths is so high because “no one can ever recover from COVID-19”: A patient discharged from the hospital after being treated for COVID-19 will still be counted as a COVID death — even if they had a heart attack or were run over by a bus three months later.

    It is difficult to think of another country that has botched the response to the coronavirus more spectacularly than the United States. Joel Achenbach, William Wan, Karin Brulliard, and Chelsea Janes write that the death rate from COVID-19-19 in the United States looks like that of countries with vastly lower wealth, health-care resources, and technological infrastructure, adding: “If there was a mistake to be made in this pandemic, America has made it.” Michael D. Shear, Noah Weiland, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman, and David E. Sanger write that the roots of the U.S. current inability to control the pandemic can be traced to mid-April, when the White House began to focus on shifting responsibility for leading the fight against the pandemic – which was becoming a public health, economic, and political disaster — from the White House to the states.

    Wearing a face mask has become a political issue. J. Alexander Navarro writes that this was also the case during the 1918 pandemic. Beginning Monday, wearing face masks in public will be mandatory in France, and Valentin Hamon-Beugin writes [in French] that several French start-ups have developed technologies which would allow the authorities to monitor citizens’ compliance with the new rule.

  • The Right Approach to Getting out of the Current Crisis

    Four leading Israeli researchers call for a realistic, science-based, myths-free approach to the coronavirus crisis. They argue that the Swedish approach, despite early localized setbacks, has not only been a success – it also helps explode the three myths which have led governments around the world to impose economically ruinous and socially destructive lockdowns. These myths are: 1) That the immunity triggered by infections does not last long, and hence cannot be relied upon to create herd immunity; 2) that in order to achieve herd immunity through infection-triggered immunity, at least 60 percent of the population must be infected; and 3) that the number of death resulting from wider infection would higher than the number of deaths resulting from economic lockdown and social restrictions.

  • Herd Immunity: Why the Figure Is Always a Bit Vague

    Nearly 100 years ago, two British researchers, William Topley and Graham Wilson, were experimenting with bacterial infections in mice. They noticed that individual survival depended on how many of the mice were vaccinated. So the role of the immunity of an individual needed to be distinguished from the immunity of the entire herd. Adam Kleczkowski writes in The Conversation that, fast-forwarding a century, and the concept of “herd immunity” is now widely discussed in government dispatches and newspaper articles. But what does it actually mean? “When a disease such as COVID-19 spreads through the population, it leaves some people immune, at least in the short term,” he writes. “The people who become infected later will increasingly have contact with these immune people and not with the susceptible ones. As a result, the risk of infection is reduced and eventually the disease stops spreading. This might happen even if some people in the population are still susceptible. Vaccination can be used to protect susceptible people and thereby hasten the decline of the epidemic. It can also be used to stop the virus from spreading in the first place.”