Danger Dust

Silicosis

Silica is one of the most abundant minerals in the earth's crust and is widely distributed in nature. Silicosis is caused by inhalation of tiny particles of crystalline silica (usually quartz). Workers at greatest risk are those who move or blast rock and sand (miners, quarry workers, stonecutters, construction workers) or who use silica-containing rock or sand abrasives (sand blasters, glass makers, foundry, gemstone, and ceramic workers, potters). Outbreaks of severe silicosis have recently been identified in workers in the engineered stone industry.

Factors that influence the incidence and severity of silicosis include

• Duration and intensity of exposure

• Form and surface characteristics of the silica particles

Amorphous silica, such as glass or diatomaceous earth, does not have a crystalline structure and does not cause silicosis.

When inhaled, silica dust passes into the lungs, and scavenger cells such as macrophages engulf it (see Overview of the Immune System). Enzymes released by the scavenger cells cause the lung tissue to scar and form nodules. In low-intensity or short-term exposures, these nodules remain discrete and do not compromise lung function. With higher-intensity or more prolonged exposures, these nodules coalesce (come together) and cause progressive fibrosis and lung dysfunction, or they sometimes form large masses (called progressive massive fibrosis).

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has published a new guide for people fabricating and installing stone worktops. This guidance is designed to remind dutyholders and workers about the need to ensure that suitable procedures and controls are in place to help protect against exposure to stone dust and prevent workers breathing in respirable crystalline silica (RCS).

Stone workers are at risk of exposure to airborne particles of stone dust containing RCS when processing stone, including engineered stone, by cutting, chiselling and polishing. Over time, breathing in these silica particles can cause irreversible, life-changing and often fatal respiratory conditions such as silicosis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and lung cancer.

The study presented a novel approach to understanding the associations between air pollution, fertilization, and embryo quality by evaluating the independent associations between maternal and paternal air pollution exposure at times when a female's ovaries are producing eggs (also known as oocytes) and when a male's testicles are producing sperm.

Ambient exposure to organic carbon—a major element of the hazardous fine particulate matter PM2.5, which is emitted from combustion sources such as vehicle exhaust, industrial processes, and wildfires—consistently showed negative impacts on oocyte survival, fertilization, and embryo quality.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is expected to announce by Friday whether it will continue to allow paraquat, an herbicide suspected of causing Parkinson’s disease, to be sprayed on U.S. crops. Use of the weed killer has recently soared in the United States, but it is banned in more than 70 other countries.

The decision would allow continued use of a cheap, broad-spectrum weed killer, which is extremely toxic if ingested or inhaled. Scientists and patient advocacy groups also say a mass of evidence from lab dishes, animals, and people—including a rigorous epidemiological study published last year—suggests exposure to paraquat very likely causes Parkinson’s, the fastest growing neurodegenerative disorder.

A new study shows distinct effects of neonicotinoid pesticide exposure in different bumble bee body parts, explaining why pesticides have diverse harmful effects and highlighting the need for more sensitive safety testing.

The researchers emphasize that these changes, akin to patterns seen in aging and cancer, indicate a profound threat to bee health—affecting every tissue in damaging ways.

"We apply pesticides without fully understanding their effects on beneficial insect pollinators"

This study highlights an urgent need to reevaluate pesticide safety practices to prevent further harm to natural pollinators—species essential for producing the many fruits and nuts we eat and for maintaining biodiversity. It comes at a time when citizens and governments worldwide are increasingly concerned about biodiversity loss, setting ambitious targets for reversing declines and restoring ecosystem health.

Yes, indeed. The world turns out to be home to hundreds — perhaps thousands — of species of venomous caterpillars, and at least a few of them pack a punch toxic enough to kill or permanently injure a person. That alone is reason for scientists to study them. But caterpillars also contain a potential windfall of medically useful compounds within their toxic secretions.

An analysis of the nine top players in the U.S. fossil fuel-derived hydrocarbon industries (oil/gas, plastics, and agrichemicals) shows tight linkages across the three different sectors, with news media, other petrochemical industry players, and politicians also frequently tagged.

The findings suggest more investigation is warranted into how these organizations may use social media to amplify one another's messages and shape public discourse around their industries and the climate crisis.

Source:

Networks of climate obstruction: Discourses of denial and delay in US fossil energy, plastic, and agrichemical industries

https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000370

Tick-borne diseases accounted for 77% of all vector-borne disease reports in the USA from 2004 to 2016, and 82% of these reported tick-borne disease cases were Lyme disease.

Conclusions

Our efforts revealed the complications of creating a comprehensive dataset of tick abundance and pathogen prevalence across time and space due to variations in tick collection and pathogen testing methods.

Although tick abundance has not changed along the more southern latitudes in our study over this time period, and only gradually changed in the more northern latitudes of our study, human risk for exposure to tick-borne pathogens has increased due to increased pathogen prevalence in I. scapularis.

The trial enrolled 2,041 family members of people with drug-resistant TB. These family members had early infection, which had not yet developed into the active form of drug-resistant TB. The study was conducted across 10 provinces in Vietnam, a country with a high rate of drug-resistant TB.

The trial found that levofloxacin reduced the risk of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in adults and adolescents by 45 percent.

Such experiences fit into a long, troubling tradition in medicine. Because there often aren’t conclusive tests for these types of complex chronic conditions, and because many patients do not outwardly appear unwell, they’re frequently told that they aren’t physically sick at all—that symptoms are all in their heads. “Mainstream medicine really isn’t geared toward treating conditions and diseases that it cannot see under a microscope,”

Erasmus syndrome is a rare entity in which silicosis may accompany systemic scleroderma was defined in 1957 by Erasmus.

In addition to silicosis, silica exposure can trigger autoimmune diseases such as scleroderma and rheumatoid arthritis.

Herein, a 41-year-old male patient, who worked in denim grinding for 3 months and was diagnosed with Erasmus syndrome, will be presented.

Here, we report a case of a 41-year-old male patient presenting with interstitial lung disease, scleroderma, and serpiginous supravenous hypermelanosis caused by silica exposure who worked in the denim grinding for a short period of three months. In order not to miss silicosis, especially in male patients diagnosed with scleroderma, silica exposure should be questioned. As stated in our case, Erasmus syndrome can develop even with short-term silica exposure.

In this study, we conducted a comprehensive serological and cellular analysis of patients with autoimmune systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) who received the Wuhan-Hu-1 monovalent mRNA coronavirus disease 2019 vaccine. Our findings revealed that patients with SLE exhibited reduced avidity of anti-receptor-binding domain antibodies, leading to decreased neutralization potency and breadth.

In our SLE cohort, we also observed reduced seroconversion associated with treatment with mycophenolate mofetil. Yet, in contrast to findings in kidney transplant recipients, the second and third doses were able to rescue the initially deficient responses in these patients.

Globally, the knowledge acquired in this study should form the basis for new strategies to enhance the efficacy and durability of mRNA vaccinations, including modifications of vaccine dosing and timing and modulation of the magnitude and/or timing of the administration of immunosuppressive agents.

Until now, scientists believed this autoimmune response occurred because viral proteins mimicked the body's own proteins, confusing the immune system into attacking both. The Garvan team revealed that this is not the case—rather, the critical trigger is mutations in "rogue clone" B cells.

"This discovery fundamentally changes our understanding of how infections can cause autoimmune conditions," says Professor Chris Goodnow, Head of the Immunogenomics Lab at Garvan and the study's co-senior author.

"By pinpointing these rogue clones, we can better understand how to target them, which is a potentially transformative approach to treating autoimmune disease in patients."

Report on combustible dust

Just to clean up existing legacy pollution in the UK, analysis has found it will cost an estimated £428m every year for the next 20 years, based on existing cost data. This would cover remediating contaminated soils, landfill leachate and to treat 5% of the drinking water in large water supply zones for just the two regulated PFAS compounds, PFOS and PFOA. These costs are conservative, as they only include decontamination costs, not socioeconomic costs or potential costs to the health system. It also assumes that PFAS emissions stop immediately.

The South African government has launched a rescue operation at an abandoned gold mine in the country’s North West province, where at least 109 men have died, a group representing the miners said, after local authorities cut off vital supplies in a dramatic bid to crack down on the country’s illegal mining trade.

The bodies of 100 men remain trapped in the Stilfontein mine, according to the Mining Affected Communities United in Action (MACUA), who told CNN that nine bodies were pulled out of the shaft on Monday, along with 20 survivors.

Meshack Mbangula, head of the Mining Affected Communities United in Action (MACUA), told CNN Tuesday that the men had possibly died from hunger and dehydration.

While there are varying reports on how many men have been trapped, Mbangula estimated that 500 people are still underground. Conditions in the shafts, which are several kilometers deep, are continuing to deteriorate, he said.

With limited experimental screening, we obtained protein designs with remarkable thermal stability, high binding affinity and near-atomic-level agreement with the computational models. The designed proteins effectively neutralized all three 3FTx subfamilies in vitro and protected mice from a lethal neurotoxin challenge. Such potent, stable and readily manufacturable toxin-neutralizing proteins could provide the basis for safer, cost-effective and widely accessible next-generation antivenom therapeutics.

When water is depleted, the system is vulnerable to chemical contamination.

Drinking water contamination can also come from the air and from damage to water system infrastructure. Heat can partially melt plastic pipes and water meters, releasing chemicals; smoke can be sucked into water systems; and breaks in the water infrastructure can introduce contamination.

A host of cancer-causing chemicals have been found in damaged water systems after wildfires. Sometimes these chemicals, such as benzene, can cause someone to become immediately ill if they drink or use the water. Symptoms can include nausea, headaches and rashes.

These chemicals stick to the infrastructure surfaces and can even penetrate some plastic pipes and gaskets. Removing them can take days to months. Some plastics can adsorb chemicals like a sponge and release them into clean drinking water slowly, making that water unsafe for long periods of time.

Academic journals, archives, and repositories are seeing an increasing number of questionable research papers clearly produced using generative AI. They are often created with widely available, general-purpose AI applications, most likely ChatGPT, and mimic scientific writing. Google Scholar easily locates and lists these questionable papers alongside reputable, quality-controlled research. 

research note Summary

• A sample of scientific papers with signs of GPT-use found on Google Scholar was retrieved, downloaded, and analyzed using a combination of qualitative coding and descriptive statistics. All papers contained at least one of two common phrases returned by conversational agents that use large language models (LLM) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Google Search was then used to determine the extent to which copies of questionable, GPT-fabricated papers were available in various repositories, archives, citation databases, and social media platforms.

• Roughly two-thirds of the retrieved papers were found to have been produced, at least in part, through undisclosed, potentially deceptive use of GPT. The majority (57%) of these questionable papers dealt with policy-relevant subjects (i.e., environment, health, computing), susceptible to influence operations. Most were available in several copies on different domains (e.g., social media, archives, and repositories).

• Two main risks arise from the increasingly common use of GPT to (mass-)produce fake, scientific publications. First, the abundance of fabricated “studies” seeping into all areas of the research infrastructure threatens to overwhelm the scholarly communication system and jeopardize the integrity of the scientific record. A second risk lies in the increased possibility that convincingly scientific-looking content was in fact deceitfully created with AI tools and is also optimized to be retrieved by publicly available academic search engines, particularly Google Scholar. However small, this possibility and awareness of it risks undermining the basis for trust in scientific knowledge and poses serious societal risks.

The dust’s distribution isn’t uniform. Though this isn’t obvious at first glance, zooming in on the shells in Webb’s images reveals that some of the dust has “piled up,” forming amorphous, delicate clouds that are as large as our entire solar system. Many other individual dust particles float freely. Every speck is as small as one-hundredth the width of a human hair. Clumpy or not, all of the dust moves at the same speed and is carbon rich.

New research has found that 136 firefighters who were exposed to toxic smoke at Grenfell are now suffering from occupational diseases

1 in 4 Grenfell firefighters surveyed have reported life changing health effects since, including 66 cases of digestive diseases, 64 respiratory diseases, 22 neurological diseases and 11 cancers

The Fire Brigades Union says health monitoring is needed to save lives

The research, independently carried out by the University of Central Lancashire with assistance from the Fire Brigades Union, analysed available data from 524 of the 628 firefighters who attended the disaster.

OP: @[email protected]

In the 1730s, René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur popularized a recent discovery: the seemingly lifeless could be revived with a wealth of strategies. This “Pliny of the Eighteenth Century” (Réaumur invented a precursor to the Celsius scale, influenced methods of silk production in China, and pioneered the process of metallic tinning still used today) wrote a pamphlet titled Avis pour donner du secours à ceux que l’on croit noyez (Advice to aid those believed drowned).

After debating the pros and cons of tickling the nose with feathers and filling a drowning man’s mouth with warm urine, Réaumur reveals what he believes to be the best technique: using a pipe stem to blow stimulating tobacco smoke into the intestines through the rectum.

Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have created nanostructured alumina surfaces which are strongly antibacterial but can be used to culture cells. They found that anodic porous alumina (APA) surfaces prepared using electrochemistry in concentrated sulfuric acid had unprecedented resistance to bacterial growth, but did not hamper cell cultures.

Surfaces that resist bacterial contamination play a vital role in public health and our daily lives. While this might be achieved with powerful antibiotics and chemicals, this entails a negative environmental impact, health hazards, as well as the potential emergence of dangerous, antibiotic-resistant strains. We need alternative ways of controlling the spread of bacterial pathogens.

In conclusion, we indicate that our approach to multi-modal ctDNA analysis using deep whole genome sequencing combined with TAPS detects cancer signals in early- and late-stage cancer with high accuracy. The next step will be to perform prospective studies in unselected consecutive cases to fully establish diagnostic performance.

Caplan syndrome, or rheumatoid pneumoconiosis, was traditionally associated primarily with coal dust exposure. However, it is now attributed to inorganic dust exposure from silica and asbestos industries, notably in construction and artificial stone manufacturing. Characterized by multiple peripheral lung nodules in patients with rheumatoid arthritis and pneumoconiosis, diagnosis of Caplan syndrome necessitates imaging and potential biopsy to exclude malignancy. Individuals with rheumatoid pneumoconiosis are often asymptomatic and experience symptoms only if the nodules grow and coalesce. Progressive massive fibrosis with scarring and architectural distortion of the lung parenchyma may also occur in these individuals. In some cases, the nodules cavitate and become secondarily infected.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK499886/