Today’s events from the interface of people and planet begins, once again, with the latest Ebola news, first from the New York Times:
Using a Tactic Unseen in a Century, Countries Cordon Off Ebola-Racked Areas
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is so out of control that governments there have revived a disease-fighting tactic not used in nearly a century: the “cordon sanitaire,” in which a line is drawn around the infected area and no one is allowed out.
Cordons, common in the medieval era of the Black Death, have not been seen since the border between Poland and Russia was closed in 1918 to stop typhus from spreading west. They have the potential to become brutal and inhumane. Centuries ago, in their most extreme form, everyone within the boundaries was left to die or survive, until the outbreak ended.
Plans for the new cordon were announced on Aug. 1 at an emergency meeting in Conakry, Guinea, of the Mano River Union, a regional association of Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, the three countries hardest hit by Ebola, according to Agence France-Presse. The plan was to isolate a triangular area where the three countries meet, separated only by porous borders, and where 70 percent of the cases known at that time had been found.
The Guardian add complications:
Ebola epidemic heightened by poor facilities and distrust of healthcare
Children are dying of preventable diseases all the time in Africa. The nastiness of the Ebola outbreak shouldn’t let us forget that
In June and July approximately 5,000 women and children in Sierra Leone died of diseases. The vast majority of these deaths were avoidable. For women and children in Sierra Leone, June and July were just like any other month: unnecessarily dangerous and largely forgotten.
The Ebola outbreak in the country killed 233 people during the same period, and the story made headlines around the world. Why do the relatively small number of people dying of Ebola occupy the world’s media while the thousands of women and children who die of other illnesses barely get mentioned? Is it an attempt to raise awareness, mobilise resources and halt the epidemic? Or is sensationalism to blame? Children dying in Africa is old news, while an Ebola outbreak sounds like the setting for a Hollywood blockbuster.
The people in the global health community, a nebulous conglomerate of UN agencies, NGOs, charities and academic institutes, who spend most of their lives in relative obscurity desperately tying to raise awareness and funds, now appear on news bulletins and in the newspapers. Understandably, the focus of their discourse is the pathophysiology, containment and treatment of the Ebola outbreak. There are the predictable calls for more funding to be allocated to neglected tropical diseases.
BBC News identifies the latest addition to the at-risk list:
The World Health Organization (WHO) has classified Kenya as a “high-risk” country for the spread of the deadly Ebola virus.
Kenya was vulnerable because it was a major transport hub, with many flights from West Africa, a WHO official said. This is the most serious warning to date by the WHO that Ebola could spread to East Africa.
The number of people killed by Ebola in West Africa has risen to 1,069, the WHO said in its latest update.
The Guardian adds a donation:
Ebola: Canada to donate experimental vaccine to the WHO for use in Africa
Canada has so far produced only about 1,500 doses of vaccine, which has not been tested on humans
Canada will donate a small quantity of an experimental Ebola vaccine developed in its government laboratory to the World Health Organization for use in Africa, the country’s health minister said on Tuesday.
The decision to donate the vaccine came after the WHO said on Tuesday that it was ethical to offer untested drugs to people infected by the virus.
The Canadian government will donate between 800 to 1,000 doses of the vaccine, with the final number dependent on how much Canada holds back for research and clinical trials. The government will also keep a small supply in case it is needed domestically.
The Hill plays catch-up:
Governments scramble to develop Ebola drugs
Governments and drugmakers are scrambling to develop new treatments for the Ebola virus now that the World Health Organization (WHO) has eased restrictions on untested vaccines.
The United States government is putting cash into experimental treatments, and on Tuesday, gave $4.1 million to the drugmaker BioCryst to advance its Ebola drug BCX4430, the company announced Wednesday.
The North Carolina pharmaceutical company in 2013 had received a five-year, $22 million contract from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop the drug but is now being given extra funding to speed up trials.
China Daily makes a plea:
Ebola collaboration urged
US, China teamwork in Africa could leverage both countries’ strengths
With teams of researchers and medical experts in West Africa, the US and China should concentrate their efforts on working together to combat the Ebola epidemic, showing that the two countries can cooperate for the common good, experts said.
“The US and China have comparative advantages: China has medical teams on the ground and the US has advanced technologies and disease-control expertise,” said Yun Sun, a fellow at the Stimson Center who previously focused on China-Africa relations at the Brookings Institution.
“Through inter-governmental coordination, it is possible to coordinate their individual aid efforts to maximize results.”
Deutsche Welle issues an evacuation call:
Germany urges citizens to leave Ebola-hit nations
The German government has urged nationals to leave three countries in west Africa affected by the Ebola virus. The outbreak has now killed more than 1000 people, including a second prominent physician in Sierra Leone.
Following a meeting of a crisis unit working to stem the ongoing Ebola outbreak, Germany on Wednesday updated its travel warnings for the hardest-hit regions.
“It was decided that all German nationals who are in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia are called upon to leave due to the still-critical situation,” foreign ministry spokesman Martin Schäfer told reporters, adding that German medical personnel needed on the ground were “explicitly exempt.”
German embassies and consulates in the three countries would remain open, Schäfer also said.
Want China Times calls an alert:
Customs alert against Ebola in China
The Chinese customs authority said Tuesday it has asked customs checkpoints across the country to strengthen inspections to prevent the deadly Ebola virus from entering China.
The General Administration of Customs (GAC) said customs inspectors were told to carry out stricter inspections on transportation facilities, goods and materials from regions affected by Ebola.
Customs checkpoints nationwide were also asked to closely cooperate with the quarantine authority in case of any suspected infections.
The Christian Science Monitor poses a question:
Ebola and ethics: Are rich nations doing enough to fight the outbreak?
The Ebola outbreak in West Africa is a matter of justice and ethics, experts said Tuesday. This has to do with medical testing and international funding.
The battle to contain the Ebola virus is not just about disease control in West Africa, it’s also about global ethics.
The ethical issues include questions about when experimental treatments should be used in the current outbreak and who gets them. But they also include whether greater global coordination is needed on health policy before such an outbreak occurs.
That’s partly a matter of money. In this case, a public-health emergency is centered in some of the world’s poorest nations – Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. These are countries that haven’t set up the basic disease-response infrastructure called for by the UN’s World Health Organization (WHO).
And for our final Ebola item, there’s this from Nextgov:
Hacked Yahoo News Tweet Reports Atlanta Ebola Outbreak
A prominent publication’s Twitter feed announced Sunday afternoon the Ebola disease had spread beyond an Atlanta hospital where two infected Americans are quarantined, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports.
“BREAKING: EBOLA OUTBREAK IN ATLANTA!” a Yahoo News tweet blared. “Estimated 145 people infected so far since Doctors carrying the disease were flown in from Africa.”
Few of the hundreds of people who retweeted the message seemed to take it seriously.
SINA English opens today’s water woes:
N. China province suffers worst drought in 63 years
North China’s Liaoning Province is suffering the harshest drought in 63 years, and things could get worse.
Since July, the province has received the least precipitation since meteorological records began in 1951, the provincial meteorological bureau said in a statement.
The lingering drought has affected a majority of the province,devastating 2 million hectares of crops. The drought may affect more crops with forecasts predicting less-than-normal rainfall for the remainder of August, the statement said.
The San Francisco Chronicle brings it closer to Casa esnl:
California drought: San Francisco puts caps on watering
San Francisco on Tuesday joined a growing number of cities that are rationing water amid a statewide drought, imposing a mandatory 10 percent reduction on outdoor watering.
The mandate, which requires customers to use no more than 90 percent of what they used outdoors in 2013, is meant for all the agency’s customers. But it will be enforced mostly on large accounts that use water outside exclusively, including golf courses, shopping malls and office parks.
Enforcement is limited because water meters at most homes and businesses don’t distinguish between indoor and outdoor consumption.
And the Contra Costa Times brights it to our doorstep:
EBMUD outlaws wasting water, but sets no fines for violators
Two of the Bay Area’s largest water agencies on Tuesday took steps to reduce outdoor water use, but stopped short of penalizing residential customers.
Responding to a state water board push for stronger conservation measures statewide, the East Bay Municipal Utility District Board outlawed water wasting practices such as flooding gutters and watering lawns more than twice a week — practices it previously only asked customers to avoid.
The board, however, said it wouldn’t fine customers as is done in some other areas with more severe water shortages such as Dublin, Santa Cruz, and Sacramento.
From the Los Angeles Times, another kind of water woe:
Oil companies fracking into drinking water sources, new research shows
Energy companies are fracking for oil and gas at far shallower depths than widely believed, sometimes through underground sources of drinking water, according to research released Tuesday by Stanford University scientists.
Though researchers cautioned their study of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, employed at two Wyoming geological formations showed no direct evidence of water-supply contamination, their work is certain to roil the public health debate over the risks of the controversial oil and gas production process.
Fracking involves high-pressure injection of millions of gallons of water mixed with sand and chemicals to crack geological formations and tap previously unreachable oil and gas reserves. Fracking fluids contain a host of chemicals, including known carcinogens and neurotoxins.
And an earlier story by the same Los Angeles Times reporter, Neela Banerjee:
Hormone-disrupting chemicals found in water at fracking sites
Water samples collected at Colorado sites where hydraulic fracturing was used to extract natural gas show the presence of chemicals that have been linked to infertility, birth defects and cancer, scientists reported Monday.
The study, published in the journal Endocrinology, also found elevated levels of the hormone-disrupting chemicals in the Colorado River, where wastewater released during accidental spills at nearby wells could wind up.
Tests of water from sites with no fracking activity also revealed the activity of so-called endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or EDCs. But the levels from these control sites were lower than in places with direct links to fracking, the study found.
From the Guardian, another fracking anxiety:
Fracking’s impact on wildlife remains unknown, study finds
Lack of data on pollution and habitat loss makes it hard to gauge wider effect of shale gas development in North America
A decade into North America’s fracking boom, the impact on wildlife and the environment remains largely unknown, according to a new study.
“We’re conducting a giant experiment without even collecting the important data on the water, air, land or wildlife impacts,” said Sara Souther, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin, one of the co-authors of the peer-reviewed research examining the environmental impacts of shale gas development in the US and Canada.
Although the technique of hydraulic fracturing shale has been used for at least 20 years, there is “surprisingly little research” on impacts, found the study, published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.
“We do know chemical contamination of ground and surface water is happening all the time but no one knows what the impacts are because the data isn’t being collected,” Souther said.
After the jump, another fracking woe, a petro protest, poison in the home, Canada’s lax environmental laws, a poisonous alien invader, and pot-powered batteries. . ..
MIT Technology Review covers a fracking disappointment:
China’s Shale Gas Bust
China is betting long-term on unconventional gas, but it is running into problems developing its vast shale resources
China is finding it harder than it expected to unlock a shale gas boom like the one in North America, calling into question its lofty goals to use natural gas to help clean up its air and control the growth of greenhouse gas emissions. Citing complicated geology and high production costs, the Chinese government has cut its ambitious 2020 target for shale gas development roughly in half.
In 2013 China became the third biggest user of natural gas behind the United States and Russia, consuming 166 billion cubic meters (bcm). By 2019, the International Energy Agency expects China’s annual natural gas consumption to grow 90 percent, to 315 bcm. Half of that increase is expected to be supplied by domestic gas production, which would come from multiple sources, including shale reserves.
That IEA estimate for gas consumption is much lower than the production target China had set for itself: 420 bcm of natural gas annually by 2020, with hydrofracturing, or fracking, being used to get 60 to 80 bcm from shale.
And TheLocal.es covers another petro protest:
Spain ignores protests over Canaries oil deal
Spain’s energy ministry on Wednesday released details of a controversial deal allowing oil giant Repsol to begin exploring for oil and gas off the Canary Islands, despite fierce opposition from environmental groups and the regional government.
Repsol will pay up to €60 million ($80 million) in civil liability and environmental risk insurance in return for a green light to begin the controversial oil explorations, an official state bulletin published on Wednesday reveals.
The energy giant and its partners in the project, Woodside Energy Iberia and RWE Dea AG, will now have four years in which to carry out exploratory drilling.
The Guardian finds fault:
Mount Polley mine spill: a hazard of Canada’s industry-friendly attitude?
A dam at a waste pond on the site of a British Columbia mine burst last week, releasing 4.5m cubic meters of potentially toxic slurry into virtually untouched forest
The scale of the devastation only became apparent from the air. A dam at a waste pond on the site of a British Columbia open-pit mine had burst, releasing 10m cubic meters of water and 4.5m cubic meters of potentially toxic slurry into virtually untouched forest, lakes and rivers into an area of Canada populated mostly by the indigenous First Nations peoples. Soda Creek First Nations chief Bev Sellars took a helicopter tour to assess the scale of the disaster. “It looked like an avalanche, but avalanches don’t have toxic waste in them,” she said.
Government reports about the incident at the Mount Polley mine on 4 August have been cautiously optimistic, saying the surrounding water is likely safe to drink, and that wildlife will not be significantly impacted by the spill.
But the industry-friendly attitude that has become a hallmark of both the British Columbia and federal governments in Canada over the past decade has led to scepticism. Local activists and residents say they are waiting for data of their own to determine the safety of the surrounding environment. In the meantime, just over a week on from the spill, they are working to determine why it happened in the first place.
Bloomberg covers resistance to a household toxin:
Consumer Groups Put Pressure on Retailers to Drop Triclosan
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) and other retailers are under mounting pressure to eliminate products with triclosan, an antibacterial chemical used in hand soaps and Colgate-Palmolive Co. (CL)’s Total toothpaste.
Mike Schade, who is running a retailer-focused Mind the Store campaign for a Washington-based consumer group called Safer Chemicals, Healthy Families, said activists are increasing their efforts to get stores to remove potentially harmful ingredients from their shelves, including triclosan.
“New scientific studies continue to emerge on a monthly basis showing that this is a chemical that is hazardous at very low levels of exposure,” Schade, whose group lobbies to ban toxic chemicals from household products, said in an interview. “We think that it’s critically important for retailers and for brands like Colgate to move swiftly in phasing out this unnecessary hazardous chemical once and for all.”
From Public Radio International, a lethal alien invader on a previously toad-free island:
In Madagascar, invasive toads are threatening rare wildlife and frightening locals
Jonathan Kolby, a doctoral candidate who studies toads at the University of Queensland in Australia, says there have already been reports of some endemic boa snakes dying after trying to eat the toads. And he says they could also pose a threat to birds and mammals that might prey on them.
Kolby is keeping a close eye on Madagascar because of what happened when a very similar species arrived in Australia some 80 years ago. There, cane toads were imported from Latin America by farmers hoping to control a scourge of beetles. The effort failed, but from just a few dozen individuals the toxic toads quickly spread across all of northern and eastern Australia, causing local extinctions of native animals in their path.
The cane toads are still taking their toll today, and Kolby worries about a similar situation unfolding in Madagascar, because, he says, like those in Australia, the Asian toads can adapt to a wide variety of habitats.
“That virtually means they can spread across the island,” Kolby says.
BBC News covers a major Down Under environmental catastrophe:
Australia Great Barrier Reef outlook ‘poor and deteriorating’
The outlook for Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is poor despite conservation efforts, with further deterioration expected in coming years, a report says.
The bleak forecast came in a five-yearly report released by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority.
Climate change remained the biggest threat to the site, the report said.
But poor water quality from land-based run-off, coastal development and fishing also posed challenges, it said.
From the Mainichi, our lone Fukushimapocalypse Now! Item:
TEPCO mulls spinning off hydropower, renewable energy operations
Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) is considering spinning off its hydropower and renewable energy operations as part of its plan to adopt a holding company structure in April 2016, it has been learned.
The utility had planned to spin off its three business operations — thermal power generation, power transmission and distribution, and retailing — and make them independent companies. But it will spin off a total of four business operations after turning its hydropower and renewable energy operations, which are part of its power transmission and distribution operations, into a separate company. TEPCO, the operator of the crippled Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant, is looking to secure neutrality for its power transmission and distribution unit and improve the efficiency and profitability of the other three operations as stand-alone business entities.
In its “New Comprehensive Special Business Plan” worked out in January this year, TEPCO adopted a policy of spinning off three business operations — thermal power generation, power transmission and distribution, and retailing — under a holding company, starting in fiscal 2016. The hydropower and renewable energy units were included in the new power transmission and distribution company to be established. As for the electricity system reform pursued by the government, major utility companies will be required to separate their power transmission and distribution operations from their power generation and retailing services by around fiscal 2018 to 2020.
And for our final item, hold onto those stems, via BBC News:
Hemp fibres ‘better than graphene’
The waste fibres from hemp crops can be transformed into high-performance energy storage devices, scientists say.
They “cooked” cannabis bark into carbon nanosheets and built supercapacitors “on a par with or better than graphene” – the industry gold standard. Electric cars and power tools could harness this hemp technology, the US researchers say.
They presented their work at the American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco.
“People ask me: why hemp? I say, why not?” said Dr David Mitlin of Clarkson University, New York, who describes his device in the journal ACS Nano. “We’re making graphene-like materials for a thousandth of the price – and we’re doing it with waste.
“The hemp we use is perfectly legal to grow. It has no THC in it at all – so there’s no overlap with any recreational activities.”
