A group of experts meeting at the World Health Organization (WHO) recommend a promising experimental Ebola vaccine in future outbreaks of this fatal disease. 

The 2013 Ebola outbreak in West Africa killed 11,300 people, highlighting the need for a vaccine to control of the deadly virus.  Of 12 candidate vaccines, only one that was tested in Guinea reportedly has proven to be clinically effective.

However, the Chair of SAGE and WHO senior health adviser, Alejandro Cravioto, notes the vaccine is not yet licensed and therefore should only be used under strict conditions, such as informed consent.

“That means people have to sign saying that they want to take the vaccine and under the conditions that we call good clinical practices,” he said. “We still have something that could really be of help in case we have something that could happen in the near future.” 

Cravioto tells VOA this vaccine could be a game-changer because it has demonstrated its effectiveness and its impact in a particular setting, with a particular species of Ebola.

“It is important to keep in mind that we are not recommending or SAGE is not recommending currently, and there is no evidence to recommend wide-scale use of the vaccine and to again start to vaccinate before an occurrence of an outbreak,” he said. “We have no idea of the duration of protection that is afforded by the vaccine to start with.” 

SAGE recommends the so-called ring strategy that was used in the 1970s to eradicate smallpox to deliver the Ebola vaccine.  This involves vaccinating people who are infected with the virus and all those who have come in contact with them. 

This method creates a buffer zone or protective ring around the patient to prevent the spread of infection.
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United Nations officials say at least 11 people have died from a mysterious illness in Liberia, and tests have been negative for the Ebola virus.

The World Health Organization said Friday that authorities are looking into whether the people were sickened by something they ate or were exposed to a chemical or bacteria.

Five others remain hospitalized in Sinoe County, about 250 miles (400 kilometers) outside the capital, after complaining of abdominal pains. Two are critically ill.

The cases over the past week have evoked painful memories in Liberia, where more than 4,800 people died during the Ebola epidemic.

Those who fell sick this week all had attended a relative’s funeral. That was how many Ebola victims contracted the disease when they came in contact with victims’ corpses.
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A robot zaps and vacuums up venomous lionfish in Bermuda. A helicopter pelts Guam’s trees with poison-baited dead mice to fight the voracious brown tree snake. A special boat with giant winglike nets stuns and catches Asian carp in the U.S. Midwest.

In the fight against alien animals that invade and overrun native species, the weird and wired wins.

“Critters are smart – they survive,” said biologist Rob “Goose” Gosnell, head of U.S. Department of Agriculture’s wildlife services in Guam, where brown tree snakes have gobbled up nearly all the native birds. “Trying to outsmart them is hard to do.”

Invasive species are plants and animals that thrive in areas where they don’t naturally live, usually brought there by humans, either accidentally or intentionally. Sometimes, with no natural predators, they multiply and take over, crowding out and at times killing native species.

Now, new technology is being combined with the old methods – weed pulling, trapping and pesticides. Finding new weapons is crucial because invasive species are costly – $314 billion per year in damages in just the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, India and Brazil. It’s also one of the leading causes of extinction on islands, such as Guam, according to Piero Genovesi, an Italian scientist who chairs the invasive species task force for an international organization .

“We have totally new tools that were just unthinkable a few years ago,” Genovesi said.

Case in point: There are companies that now market traps for wild pigs that are triggered by cellphones.

“There’s enough activity that there’s starting to be an industry,” said University of California, Santa Cruz research biologist Bernie Tershy.

Lionfish

A new underwater robot is targeting the stunning but dangerous lionfish, which has spread over the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and up the U.S. East Coast as far north as New York’s Long Island, with its venomous spines that are dangerous to touch. With no natural predator in the Atlantic, the voracious aquarium fish devour large amounts of other fish including key commercial fish species such as snapper and grouper. The robot is the creation of Colin Angle, chief executive officer of IRobot, which makes the Roomba vacuum cleaner. Along with his wife, Erika, and colleagues, he created a new nonprofit to turn automation into environmental tools.

The robot, called Guardian LF1, uses what Angle says is a gentle shock to immobilize the lionfish before they are sucked alive into a tube. In its first public outing this month, the robot caught 15 lionfish during two days of testing in Bermuda. Top chefs competed in a cook-off of the captured lionfish. Lionfish go for nearly $10 a pound and Angle is hoping to get the price of the robot down from tens of thousands of dollars to about $500.

“What’s next?” Angle said. “Our ambition is much larger than lionfish.”

Brown tree snakes

A few decades ago, native birds started disappearing from the Pacific island of Guam, baffling scientists until they found that non-native brown tree snakes were eating all the birds and their eggs. The snakes, which live in the trees, had no natural enemies and just trapping them wasn’t working, Gosnell said. The snakes did prove to have one enemy: the painkiller acetaminophen, a generic form of Tylenol.

So biologists came up with a plan : Use a painkiller pill glued to dead fetal mice as bait. The mice are put in tubes, and dropped by helicopter in batches of 3,000. The mice pop out, and the whole contraption dangles in the trees. It’s still experimental but it will soon go to more regular use. There is one problem. Using dead fetal mice as bait is expensive and they have to be kept cold. But biologists are working on a solution: mouse butter. A new bait mixture smells like mice to snakes, but minus the expense and logistical problems.

Asian carp

U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials are using souped-up old technology to catch Asian carp, a fish that’s taken over rivers and lakes in the Midwest. They use a specialized boat – the Magna Carpa – with giant winglike nets that essentially uses electric current as an underwater taser to stun the fish, said biologist Emily Pherigo. At higher doses, the fish are killed and float to the surface. In just five minutes, they can collect 500 fish, and later turn them into fertilizer. Using electro-fishing was written about as a possible conservation technique back in 1933, said biologist Wyatt Doyle.

Wild goats

On the Galapagos islands, wild goats were a major problem. In less than five years, scientists wiped out tens of thousands with sterile “Mata Hari” females. Biologist Karl Campbell of the nonprofit Island Conservation introduced specialized female goats that researchers sterilized and chemically altered into a permanent state of heat, to lure the male goats into fruitless goat sex. Santiago Island, once home to 80,000 goats, is now goat free and larger Isabella Island is getting close, he said.

And now, Campbell and others are going one step further: Tinkering with the genes of mosquitoes and mice to make them sterile or only have male offspring . That would eventually cause a species to die off on an island because of lack of females to mate with. There are worries about regulating and controlling this technology, along with actually being able to get it done, so it is years away, Campbell said.

 
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Another protest march will take place in Washington Saturday. The People’s Climate March targets President Donald Trump’s efforts to undo action on climate change. A movement that began with a few scientists has grown to include everyone from low-income people of color to major corporations. VOA’s Steve Baragona has more.
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Drug overdose deaths in the United States continue to rise. The majority of those deaths can be attributed to opioids, synthetic or natural drugs that when used correctly relieve pain. But, according to health authorities, nearly 100 Americans die every day from opioid abuse. While the nation tries to figure out ways to end the flood of opioids on U.S. streets, others are trying to help those who are trying to put opioid abuse behind them. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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New climate-change findings mean the Pacific Ocean off California may rise higher, and storms and high tides hit harder, than previously thought, officials said.

The state’s Ocean Protection Council on Wednesday revised upward its predictions for how much water off California will rise as the climate warms. The forecast helps agencies in the nation’s most populous state plan for climate change as rising water seeps toward low-lying airports, highways and communities, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Discoveries that ice sheets are melting increasingly fast in Antarctica, which holds nearly 90 percent of the world’s ice, largely spurred the change.

Antarctic ice melting

 

As fossil-fuel emissions warm the Earth’s atmosphere, melting Antarctic ice is expected to raise the water off California’s 1,100 miles (1,770 kilometers) of coastline even more than for the world as a whole.

 

“Emerging science is showing us a lot more than even five years ago,” council deputy director Jenn Eckerle said Thursday.

Gov. Jerry Brown has mandated that state agencies take climate change into account in planning and budgeting. The council’s projections will guide everything from local decisions on zoning to state action on whether to elevate or abandon buildings near the coast and bays.

In the best-case scenario, waters in the vulnerable San Francisco Bay, for example, likely would rise between 1 foot and 2.4 feet (one-third to three-fourths of a meter) by the end of this century, the ocean council said.

Rising water alters weather patterns

 

However, that’s only if the world cracks down on climate-changing fossil-fuel emissions far more than it is now.

The worst-case scenario entails an even faster melting of Antarctic ice, which could raise ocean levels off California a devastating 10 feet by the end of this century, the state says. That’s at least 30 times faster than the rate over the last 100 years.

Scientists say rising water from climate change already is playing a role in extreme winters such as this past one in California, contributing to flooding of some highways and helping crumble cliffs beneath some oceanfront homes.

 
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No bones? No problem! Scientists say they’ve figured out a way to extract tiny traces of ancient human DNA from dirt in caves that lack skeletal remains.

The technique could be valuable for reconstructing human evolutionary history, according to the study published Thursday in the journal Science.

That’s because fossilized bones, currently the main source of ancient DNA, are scarce even at sites where circumstantial evidence points to a prehistoric human presence.

“There are many caves where stone tools are found but no bones,” said Matthias Meyer, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who co-authored the study.

The researchers collected 85 sediment samples from seven caves in Europe and Russia that humans are known to have entered or even lived in between 14,000 and 550,000 years ago.

By refining a method previously used to find plant and animal DNA, they were able to search specifically for genetic material belonging to ancient humans and other mammals.

Scientists focused on mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down the maternal line, because it is particularly suited to telling apart closely related species. And by analyzing damaged molecules they were able to separate ancient genetic material from any contamination left behind by modern visitors

The researchers found evidence of 12 mammal families including extinct species such as woolly mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, cave bear and cave hyena.

By further enriching the samples for human-like DNA, however, the scientists were able to detect genetic traces of Denisovans — a mysterious lineage of ancient humans first discovered in a cave in Siberia — and Neanderthals from samples taken at four sites.

Crucially, one of the sites where they discovered Neanderthal DNA was a cave in Belgium, known as Trou Al’Wesse, where no human bones had ever been found, though stone artefacts and animal bones with cut marks strongly suggested people had visited it.

 Eske Willerslev, who helped pioneer the search for DNA in sediment but wasn’t involved in the latest research, said the new study was an interesting step, but cautioned that it’s difficult to determine how old sediment samples found in caves are.

“In general [it] is very disturbed and unless you can show that’s not the case you have no idea of the date of the findings,” said Willerslev, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Meyer said the new method greatly increases the number of sites where archaeologists will be able to find genetic evidence to help fill gaps in the history of human evolution and migration, such as how widespread Neanderthal populations were and which stone tools they were able to make.

Scientists may also be able to greatly expand their limited knowledge of the Denisovans, whose DNA can still be found in Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians today, by using the new procedure.

“In principle, every cave where there’s evidence of human activity now offers this possibility,” Meyer told The Associated Press.
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