In any case, the authorities of the world body have insisted that you can still minimize the impacts of this outbreak of swine flu, although it has been verified its transmission from person to person.

• Phase One: The influenza virus circulating among animals and not reported the transmission to humans.
• Phase Two: The virus present in infected domestic and wild animals to humans, it is considered that a pandemic may develop.
• Phase Three: Small groups of people acquire the infection.The Contagious between humans occurs and under limited circumstances. However, the fact that the virus is transmitted between people does not necessarily mean it will cause a pandemic.
• Phase Four: It verifies the transmission between humans and the virus causes disease outbreaks in communities. At this stage increases the risk of a pandemic breaks out, but does not necessarily mean it is imminent.
• Phase Five: It is characterized by the fact that the virus spreads among humans in at least two countries in the same region of the world. The declaration of this stage is a clear message that the pandemic is imminent and that the time to implement measures to mitigate the infection is short.
• Phase Six: The pandemic occurs, ie the disease is present in different regions of the world.

In the next phase, which is generated after the virus reached its peak levels pandemic of the disease are reduced. However, it is unclear whether there will be new waves of the disease.

In the post-pandemic influenza returns to the normal seasonal influenza. This is the recovery phase.

Image to link: Diario Uno

Sleeping sickness, or African trypanosomiasis, affects around 300,000 people a year in Africa and can be treated only with toxic and hard-to-administer drugs.

Scientists are investigating using insecticide-treated traps baited with attractive odours to control fly populations but so far no strong, artificial attractant has been developed for Glossina fuscipes, the species of tsetse fly that predominantly transmits the sleeping sickness parasite Trypanosoma brucei gambiense in West Africa.

The lack of artificial attractants means that existing traps are weak and more are required in a given area, making them an expensive option.

Researchers, including groups from the International Centre for Insect Physiology and Ecology in Kenya and Labovet in the Democratic Republic of Congo, assessed whether two Glossina subspecies - G.f. fuscipes and G.f. quanzensis - were attracted to the odours of their natural hosts: humans, pigs and cattle. They also tested whether G.f. fuscipes was attracted to the odour of its other host, the lizard.

They extracted air from chambers separately containing each of the hosts and tested how effective odours taken from the air were as bait in traps.

Neither fly was attracted to human or cattle smells but lizard odour-traps caught twice the number of G.f. fuscipes flies caught in regular traps, and G.f. quanzensis was attracted to pig odour.

Researchers write that identifying the components in the lizard and pig odour that the flies are attracted to will improve the performance of traps.

Image to link: Naweb Iaea

The new report by the World Health Organization (WHO) continues giving bad informs of chilling not only on inequalities in life expectancy, but in many areas of basic character such as access to drinking water or medical care.

WHO stresses that the global health situation is improving but, in view of similar data, there seems to be enough. “Clearly we need further efforts to strengthen health systems in countries with high HIV / AIDS, armed conflict or economic hardship,” says Ties Boerma, director of the Department of Health Statistics and Informatics of the organism.

“And more,” adds Dr. Boerma, “to give special attention to the poorest countries in which progress is often slower and infant mortality rates remain high.”
In fact, 40% of the 58 million deaths [in 2007] and one third of healthy life years lost each year throughout the world are a result of preventable risks. This is a poor infant feeding, inadequate infant weight, lack of sanitation, unsafe sex, snuff consumption, malnutrition.

Image to link: Mongolia Web

The Health Department came upon the restaurant, closed. Inspected and tested for everything: food, water, air conditioning, and did not discover anything. A waitress of the restaurant ,who had similar symptoms was taken to the hospital. She told the doctors she had been on holiday, and had only gone to the restaurant to collect her salary.

She had not eaten or drank anything while she was there, but had used the bathroom. When there was a toxicologist, remembering an article he had read: under the seat of the exudate, he found a small spider. The spider was captured and taken to the laboratory where it was determined that the Two-Striped Telamonia (Telamonia dimidiata), so named for their reddish color.

The poison of this spider is extremely toxic, but can take several days to produce its effects. They are cold, dark and damp, and the edges of the toilets are just the environment they like. Now we believe that these spiders can be found anywhere in the country. So please, before using a public toilet, lift the seat to check if there are spiders. That can save your life.

Image to link: Richard Seaman

Significant progress has been made in recent years by, for example, using bednets to control malaria, or antiretrovirals for HIV/AIDS. Yet many of the challenges remain as daunting as they were in Mexico City four years ago, at the last ministerial meeting - particularly in the face of new epidemics and climate change.

The good news is that research funding for the major diseases affecting the developing world is increasing rapidly, thanks partly to some organisations, as well as increased interest from international aid agencies and pharmaceutical companies.

This goes some way to addressing the well-publicised statistic that 90 per cent of the world’s spending on medical research focuses on ten per cent of its population’s needs. This charge was made at the beginning of the decade by the Global Forum on Health Research - one of the Bamako meeting’s main organisers.

But the media’s role in promoting better health isn’t purely public relations. Engaging the public in debates about designing and delivering health systems is just as important.

The media has always taken pride in its watchdog role, be it exposing fraudulent medical practices such as untested HIV/AIDS treatments, ensuring proper conduct in clinical trials, or highlighting poor healthcare facilities and how intellectual property laws can block access to affordable treatments.

This role will be as crucial as ever as health systems grow in social importance.

More challenging, but equally valuable, is journalists’ role in scrutinising why governments and international agencies fail to get relevant research carried out and findings put into practice.

The reasons may vary, ranging from blinkered priority setting (with inadequate attention on the less ‘glamorous’ chronic diseases), to a lack of coordination between those responsible for healthcare, or even sheer incompetence.

Whatever the reasons, the more the media flags up underperformance, the greater the public pressure on politicians to put things right.

Image to link: Worthing

The publication of this study, which is backed by several institutes and international agencies, is part of a strategy that seeks to “put pressure” on governments to reach agreement at the Climate Summit to be held next December in Copenhagen.

This has been explained by Kofi Annan, who lamented that the economic crisis has pushed the fight against climate change to the background.

“Climate change is not going to wait,” said the former secretary general of the United Nations.

The report notes that this currently affects over 300 million people and have an especially detrimental impact on the poorest countries, which nonetheless emit only “1 percent of CO2.

The projections for 2030 indicate that followed, the change would be responsible for 500,000 deaths per year, would affect 600 million people and would cost 300,000 million dollars (about 215,000 million).

Image to link: Vegnews

Rubber prices have tripled in the past decade and China plans that by 2010 it will be producing a third more rubber than it was in 2007 in order to feed its booming automobile and tyre industries.

Scientists are selectively breeding rubber trees to thrive at higher altitudes and trying to make them mature faster. But rubber trees are thirsty, reducing the water content in soil and drying up streams and wells - and deforestation to make way for rubber plantations is releasing huge amounts of carbon.

Scientists at the Chinese Academy of Science’s flagship institute for conservation research, the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG), have been documenting the influence rubber plantations have on the value of ecosystem services - by putting prices on environmental necessities such as nutrient cycling and erosion control.

“We will soon hit the wall in an ecological credit crunch. This is hardly a viable investment,” says one of the scientists.

Ecologists at the institute - itself enveloped by rubber plantations - are looking to strengthen their research capacity and play a stronger policy and advocacy role in biodiversity conservation in the region.

Image to link: ENN

Black carbon has newly emerged as the second biggest contributor to climate change. It is responsible for an estimated 18 per cent of warming compared with 40 per cent for carbon dioxide.

Africa and Asia produce the most soot because of the use of traditional cooking stoves, which also pose health and other environmental risks.

Low-soot stoves would rapidly reduce black carbon levels as the soot remains in the atmosphere for just a few weeks compared with years for carbon dioxide. New stoves produce 90 per cent less soot and cost around US$20 to make.

But many rural people earn only US$ 2,00 a day and cannot afford the stoves. There are also concerns about whether the stoves will produce food as tasty as that cooked on traditional stoves.

Six types of cooker are being piloted in Indian villages.

Image to link: Smartpei

As the bacterium - Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) - evolves to resist anti-TB drugs, and patients find it difficult to stick to existing drug regimes the search is on for both new drugs and good diagnostics.

Some promising drugs are in early clinical trials - for example PA-824, which could reduce the time needed to treat TB - but the odds are stacked against them because fewer than ten per cent of antibiotics that enter early clinical trials ever gain approval.

But researchers are finding that “omics” - fields involving the study of genes, proteins and metabolism - offer the potential to unlock new information about the bacterium and its interactions with people in unprecedented detail.

As well as genomics, proteomics and metabolomics, scientists are also using chemical genomics, an approach that reverses the standard drug discovery process.

The ultimate goal is to replicate Mtb “in silico“- that is, “produce a computer simulation of the bacterium that behaves just like the real thing does in the body”. Scientists should then be able to predict which bacterial components will make the best drug targets - and which candidate drugs will hit those targets most effectively.

Researchers are confident that, based on current progress,they will be able to achieve this within the next 20 years.

Image to link: Kbsgh