Danger Dust

Silicosis is claiming thousands of lives in Tanzania. Workers in cement plants and those employed in the concrete blocks manufacturing value chain are particularly vulnerable to this deadly disease as many work without adequate safety gear.

Conducted by the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health at Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS), the study emphasizes that cement manufacturing processes generate dust containing silica and other toxic materials that can severely impact the respiratory systems of exposed workers. 

In Tanzania, respiratory diseases rank among the top ten causes of death. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) accounts for six percent of deaths, while lower respiratory infections account for five percent, according to the report.

What was odd about H1N1 Russian flu pandemic

Here the story takes yet another turn. Microbiologist Peter Palese applied what was then a novel technique called RNA oligonucleotide mapping to study the genetic makeup of the new H1N1 Russian flu virus. He and his colleagues grew the virus in the lab, then used RNA-cutting enzymes to chop the viral genome into hundreds of pieces. By spreading the chopped RNA in two dimensions based on size and electrical charge, the RNA fragments created a unique fingerprint-like map of spots.

Much to Palese’s surprise, when they compared the spot pattern of the 1977 H1N1 Russian flu with a variety of other influenza viruses, this “new” virus was essentially identical to older human influenza H1N1 strains that had gone extinct in the early 1950s.

So, the 1977 Russian flu virus was actually a strain that had disappeared from the planet a quarter century early, then was somehow resurrected back into circulation. This explained why it attacked only younger people – older people had already been infected and become immune when the virus circulated decades ago in its earlier incarnation.

But how did the older strain come back from extinction?

A sobering history lesson

The resurrection of an extinct but dangerous human-adapted H1N1 virus came about as the world was scrambling to prevent what was perceived to be the imminent emergence of a swine H1N1 influenza pandemic. People were so concerned about the possibility of a new pandemic that they inadvertently caused one. It was a self-fulfilling-prophecy pandemic.

A fuel tanker has collided with another truck in Nigeria, causing an explosion that killed at least 48 people, according to the country’s emergency response agency.

The fuel tanker was also carrying cattle in the Agaie area in north-central Niger state and at least 50 of them were burned alive.

With the absence of an efficient railway system to transport cargo, fatal truck accidents are common along most of the major roads in Nigeria – Africa’s most populous country, with more than 220 million residents.

According to experts, the main causes are reckless driving, poor road conditions and poorly maintained vehicles.

In 2020 alone, there were 1,531 petrol tanker crashes resulting in 535 fatalities and 1,142 injuries, according to Nigeria’s Federal Road Safety Corps.

Occupational Disease and Women: From the Radium Girls to Garment Workers

All occupational diseases start somewhere. Sometimes they have a well-known history and treatment, as with certain cancers, tuberculosis, and more common stress-related ailments and fractures.

Coal miners develop pneumoconiosis, also known as black lung. Meatpacking and poultry-plant workers get repetitive stress injuries. Other occupational ailments are so specific they almost sound comical: Mad hatter’s disease, which afflicted Victorian-era hat makers who fell victim to mercury poisoning that damaged the nerves and brain (“mad as a hatter,” get it?); workers and artists who used lead-based paint and found themselves poisoned and in pain had painters’ colic; and as potters worked at their kilns, they breathed in tiny shards of silica dust, which lodged in and scarred their lungs, giving them potters’ rot.

No matter what an occupational disease is called, the reality has always been uglier. Sometimes capitalism extracts its pound of flesh metaphorically, and sometimes more literally, but it’s always the workers who pay the price.

Silica Dust

Silica is a mineral found in many common products. Fine silica dust can penetrate deep into the lungs. Prolonged silica dust exposure can contribute to serious health complications, including COPD, emphysema, lung cancer and silicosis.

Silica-Related Diseases

Silica dust exposure may contribute to several serious, debilitating and life-altering health conditions. Lung cancer and silicosis are among the more severe conditions caused by silica dust.

Health Conditions Related to Silica Dust

Autoimmune disorders

Bronchitis

Cardiovascular impairment

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Emphysema

Kidney disease

Lung cancer

Silicosis

Pulmonary silicosis is a debilitating condition that causes the formation of silicotic nodules in the lungs. These lesions tend to group in the upper lobes. They can lead to impaired lung function and eventually death. Silica dust exposure is the only cause of silicosis.

Could raw milk — or a cat — help explain how a person who had no contact with animals caught the virus?

News that a person in Missouri contracted H5 bird flu despite having no known contact with infected animals or birds — in other words, no evident route of infection — raises pressing questions public health officials are surely scurrying to answer.

The rationale for that urgency is this: An unexplained H5 infection raises the possibility of person-to-person spread of a flu virus that has never before circulated in humans, and to which people would not have immunity. And this with a dangerous flu virus that scientists have long feared could someday trigger a pandemic.

To be clear, it is far too soon to conclude this infection can’t be linked to some direct or indirect exposure to infected animals or birds, or to some farm product contaminated with the virus. 

But there are, as we noted, questions that need to be answered, and the sooner the better. Here are five.

By vastly understating the number of heat-related deaths, medical officials make it harder to improve heat safety and save lives

Federal records say that heat caused or contributed to at least 2,300 deaths in 2023. But the counts rely on death certificates filled out by coroners, medical examiners and other doctors, who often don’t consider heat’s potential lethality before certifying cause of death.

Heat is regularly omitted from death certificates of people like Gomez, who was not killed directly by heat but whose heart problems may have been exacerbated.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says heat and other extreme weather should be noted on death certificates. The CDC says its tallies are likely severe undercounts and in 2017 urged that natural disasters including heat be included on death certificates even if the event affected a death indirectly.

OP: @[email protected]

“It can resemble overtraining in athletes,” says Professor Nina Vøllestad.

Researchers can argue about a lot. But in one area, researchers worldwide have been remarkably unanimous:

Physical activity is healthy for both body and mind.

Even though intense training can hurt in the moment, the activity has a positive impact on everything from the heart and lungs to cognitive abilities and mood.

Similar positive effects are linked to activity on other levels, such as social activities or various forms of mental training.

But for ME/CFS sufferers, and some patients with other illnesses like long Covid and fibromyalgia, this is often not the case.

Instead, fairly mundane activities can send them to bed for days, with symptoms like extreme fatigue, flu-like feelings, pain, brain fog, and – paradoxically – sleep problems.

This is called PEM – post-exertional malaise.

Post-exertional malaise (PEM)

• Exercise-induced worsening of symptoms is a characteristic feature of ME/CFS. It has also been reported among some long Covid patients and people with fibromyalgia.

• The phenomenon is often referred to as PEM (post-exertional malaise). Some also call it PESE (post-exertional symptom exacerbation) or PENE (post-exertional neuroimmune exhaustion).

• PEM involves a worsening of symptoms after physical, mental, or emotional exertion that would not have caused problems before the illness.

• PEM can be triggered by cognitive, physical, emotional, or social activity.

• PEM can cause a wide range of symptoms. The most common are extreme fatigue, feeling like you have the flu, body aches, sleep disturbances, and cognitive problems like brain fog.

• The symptoms are often delayed and are typically worst 12 to 48 hours after the activity. They can last for days or even weeks. In the worst case, PEM can lead to long-term worsening of the illness.

The 1970s: a critical decade

One company intimately involved with the emerging science of climate change was Exxon (now ExxonMobil). Scientists working for this oil and gas giant were modelling Earth’s climate in the 1970s to understand how the increasing carbon content of the atmosphere would affect temperatures – and Exxon’s future as a business.

According to a study published in 2017 that involved scouring the company’s internal documents, Exxon scientists acknowledged back then that climate change was real and overwhelmingly caused by burning the same fossil fuels Exxon sold.

“Yet over 80% of Exxon’s editorial-style paid advertisements over the same period specifically focused on uncertainty and doubt, the study found.”

Exxon knew better – a lot better. An investigation published last year showed that forecasts of the future climate made by Exxon scientists in the 1970s were remarkably accurate. The company knew where the world was headed by continuing to burn coal, oil and gas and instead endeavoured to cover it up.

How differently history might have unfolded if the fossil fuel industry hadn’t obscured what was happening to the climate for several decades. John Grant, a sustainability expert at Sheffield Hallam University, argues that the crisis could have been solved by now – and the enormous potential of renewable energy realised much sooner.

Instead, a selection of companies, chiefly concerned with maximising profit, were allowed to decide the fate of all Earth’s inhabitants. Perverse as that may seem, our economic system enables this by leaving the means of producing the things people need (like energy) in private hands.

Amitav Ghosh, an author of 20 historical fiction and non-fiction books on colonialism and other topics, locates in this story the seeds of the climate crisis . “Colonialism, genocide and structures of organised violence were the foundations on which industrial modernity was built,” he writes. By making such destruction economically rational, capitalism encouraged activities that gradually degraded Earth’s living systems.

Published online 2021 Oct 9

Silicosis, an occupational menace is an irreversible lung disease caused by inhalation of tiny particles of crystalline silica. 

With heavy exposure, silica may pass into the bloodstream and be deposited elsewhere. Extrathoracic silicosis is less documented in the literature and is always associated with pulmonary silicosis. These calcifications can be seen in splenic hilum, liver, lymph node and paravertebral regions.

Silicosis with splenic involvement is believed to be secondary and is often regarded as 'metastatic'. Both hematogenous and retrograde lymphatic spread is possible.

Hematogenous spread occurs as a result of direct spread from bloodborne embolic lesions following the rupture of dust-laden hilar node into a pulmonary vein.

Lymphatic spread maybe anterograde or retrograde. Three mechanisms have been described. Firstly, silica may enter pulmonary lymphatics, that drain into the thoracic duct and then to the bloodstream.

Secondly, it may drain from the diaphragmatic surfaces of the inferior lobes through vessels situated in the ligamentum pulmonale into abdominal pre-aortic nodes.

Finally, retrograde lymph flow from posterior mediastinal nodes into peripancreatic nodes, and the spleen has been implied.

Splenic silicosis should be considered in the differentials of splenic calcifications, especially when there is a history of occupational exposure to silica.  The typical calcification can be found in the liver, spleen, abdominal, axillary, and cervical lymph nodes of silicotic patients, and is always accompanied by similar intrathoracic nodal calcification.

Highlights

• The GSL has reached historically low levels.

• As And Li levels in GSL exceeded EPA residential regional screening levels.

• The oxidative potential (OP) of dust from GSL is higher than the OP in other regions.

• The OP of the GSL dust was associated with metals, including Cu, Mn, Fe, and Al.

• The choice of OP assay and extraction solvent affects the OP activity of redox-active species.

Our results show that the concentration of As and Li in most of the GSL dust samples exceeded the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) soil residential regional screening levels, and the OPAA and OPDTT of dust samples from GSL playas were generally higher than the OP of other regional playas.

Our findings also indicated that the OP of the GSL dust was associated with metals, including Cu, Mn, Fe, and Al.

This is the first study evaluating the oxidative potential of dust from the GSL, which improves our understanding of how increasing aridity, particularly desiccation of saline lakes, affects air quality and public health.

Worn around the neck, the smart choker captures micromovements in the throat, which are then picked up by the strain sensor as an electrical signal and fed into brain-inspired computer software models for processing and speech recognition. It can pick up even silently mouthed words and broadcast it, which could help someone who is unable to speak following laryngeal surgery, for example.

Ultrasensitive textile strain sensors redefine wearable silent speech interfaces with high machine learning efficiency

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41528-024-00315-1

If you organized the plastic pollution that entered the environment in 2020 in a line, it could circle the Earth more than 1,500 times. Simply dumped into a pile, the refuse would fill up New York City’s Central Park in a layer as high as the Empire State Building.

Put another way, that’s about 57 million tons (52 million metric tons) of plastic waste that was not properly disposed of—and pieces of it could now be floating in the ocean, sitting at the top of a mountain or even infiltrating your bloodstream. In a new study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, scientists tallied these numbers, creating the first-ever global plastics pollution inventory.

Through a subtle effect, a yellow pigment found in Cheetos snack food enables light to travel straight through tissue

To see what’s going on beneath the skin, doctors depend on an array of expensive imaging techniques—x-rays, ultrasound, magnetic resonance imaging, endoscopy, etc. However, a team of materials scientists has found a simpler way to see into the body—of mice at least. Applying a common pigment renders the skin of the animals temporarily transparent, the researchers report today in Science, revealing the organs beneath. (And just in case you still have your appetite: The pigment is one of those used to give the snack food Cheetos its distinctive orange color.)

Light travels through water at three-quarters its speed in a vacuum, making water’s index of refraction 1.33. Air has a refractive index slightly above one. When light passes through materials with different refractive indices, its path bends. It’s the same principle that allows the lenses in your glasses to focus light onto your retinas.

In tissues, the lipids that make up cell membranes have a refractive index of about 1.4, higher than the surrounding water. So, the cells act like so many randomly oriented lenses that scatter light in all directions.

Existing techniques can render tissues—and even entire mice—transparent by removing the lipids and leaving a watery gel, allowing light to pass through without scattering. But because these techniques destroy cell membranes, they can’t be applied to living animals.

In a new bid to finally defeat bovine tuberculosis (TB), the United Kingdom plans to accelerate research on cattle vaccines, test more cattle, and end the controversial culling of wild badgers, which can spread the disease to cows. The bacterial disease poses a serious threat to dairy and beef farmers, because cattle infected with TB give less milk, provide lower quality meat, and must be slaughtered to prevent spread of the disease.

One concern is that culling can backfire; if less than 70% of badgers living near a farm are killed, infected survivors are more likely to disperse and carry the disease to other farms. Some researchers and activists believe widespread vaccination would be more effective. Since 2010, it has been possible to immunize badgers with the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine used to prevent TB in humans, because the pathogens are closely related. Such efforts have remained small scale, because vaccinating badgers requires a special license and training.

In the past two months alone, the flaming carcasses of electrocuted birds have ignited at least three wildfires in Colorado.

While the phenomenon sounds straight out of a cartoon, it's actually more common than you'd think. It's a big enough problem that electric utility companies brainstorm efforts to mitigate bird electrocution.

Without wasting more of their own saliva on elaborate discussion, Hoerman and his colleagues from the department of dental research at the Naval Training Center in Great Lakes, Illinois, got down to work. They analyzed samples from more than 200 patients and healthy controls, and found that the saliva of patients with untreated prostate cancer showed a significant increase in the levels of enzymes called acid phosphatases.

Governments have a duty to protect their citizens. While they won’t go as far as telling us what we can and cannot put in our homes, we do expect them to ensure that the buildings we live in are safe from fire.

The final report of the Grenfell Tower inquiry confirms that this was not the case in 2017 when 72 people lost their lives to a fire that engulfed their home in west London.

In 2006, the government permitted the use of combustible insulation foams on high-rise buildings. It was a cheap way to save energy.

But the presence of combustible insulation and cladding panels on the outside of buildings completely circumvents compartmentation. It allows fire to spread from flat to flat around the outside of a building. As fire spreads up and across the walls, it successively ignites the contents of individual flats while filling each flat with toxic smoke.

Inhalation of toxic smoke is one of the primary causes of fire-related deaths. In his introductory statement to the final publication of the Grenfell Tower inquiry report, chairman Martin Moore-Bick said that “all those who died in the building were overcome by toxic gases”.

When certain types of plastics burn, they release hydrogen cyanide as well as carbon monoxide. As the fire grows, it becomes limited by the air supply, and the amount of both toxicants increases by a factor of ten to 50. Some flame retardants, added to the product in order to pass the regulatory test, slow ignition but result in much more toxic, thicker, blacker smoke, even when there is plenty of air. When these products burn without enough air, the toxicity is even greater.

Highlights

• Pollution causes the largest negative impact on soil fauna communities

• Land use intensification and climate change also negatively impacted communities

• GC impacts rarely varied with body size, and taxa groups often responded similarly

• Long-term stressors had no greater impact on soil biodiversity than short-term ones

Unexpectedly, pollution caused the largest negative impact on soil biodiversity - particularly worrying due to continually increasing levels of pollution and poor mechanistic understanding of impacts relative to other GCs.

Not all GCs and stressors were detrimental; organic-based nutrient enrichment often resulted in positive responses.

Including soil biodiversity in large-scale analyses is vital to fully understand the impact of GCs across the different realms.

ASM plays a central role in local economies as well, Finn says. About 40.5 million people around the world participate in ASM in 80 different countries, and up to 270 million people depend on it.

However, ASM is linked to environmental degradation, can be detrimental to health outcomes, and is frequently associated with human rights abuses, including child labor. ASM workers generally operate with limited capital, for minimal pay, and without social safety nets.

Artisanal and small-scale mining plays a critical role in supplying the world with minerals vital for decarbonization, but this kind of mining typically lacks regulation and can be socially and environmentally harmful.

It's easy to forget this, because it's happening somewhere far away in a place we haven't heard of and to populations of people that have been absolutely marginalized for hundreds of years.

I don't think the solution lies in us shaming each other as individuals: I think part of the solution probably also lies in holding political elites and major corporate actors' feet to the fire.

Decarbonization and social justice: The case for artisanal and small-scale mining

Conclusion

This article makes the case for ASM because it is an essential way to allow economic redistribution, aid social justice, and contribute to global supply needs for critical minerals. We lay out some strong arguments against ASM but argue that these can be addressed through inclusive governance and regulatory transformations. It is imperative to understand ASM practices in a new light. Supporting new models of ASM constitutes a pivotal way to enhance social justice as global decarbonization.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214629624003244?via%3Dihub

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how viral infections can cause long-lasting effects—a condition called long COVID. Also known as post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2, long COVID has left a devastating trail of people who continue to live with long-term debilitation after infection. One such manifestation is scarring of the lungs—a condition known as post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 pulmonary fibrosis.

Those with long COVID can present with a broad constellation of symptoms, including post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 pulmonary fibrosis, which can cause severe difficulty breathing that requires oxygen supplementation. Patients with the most severe breathing difficulty may also need a lung transplant. Without additional treatment options, many patients are often left with long-term disability and life-threatening complications.

An aberrant immune–epithelial progenitor niche drives viral lung sequelae

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07926-8

• A new study concludes that nearly all of the gold imported into the European Union from Brazil comes from Amazonian areas with a high risk of illegality.

• That amounts to 1.5 metric tons of the precious metal in 2023, sourced from wildcat mines known as garimpos, which have a long history of illegality and opaqueness.

• The Brazilian government implemented a series of measures in 2023 to increase oversight of the gold trade, but experts say much of the trade continued underground.

The European Union is leading global efforts to curb the imports of deforestation-linked products, issuing a regulation in 2023 banning the import of such goods across a range of commodities, including beef, timber and soy. But there appears to be one glaring omission: gold, and in particular gold from Brazil, nearly all of which is likely tainted with illegality.

Clean indoor air protects against diseases such as COVID and flu, but we’re not doing enough to ensure it

We—and especially our children—should be able to walk into a store or a gym or a school and assume the air is clean to breathe. Like water from the faucet, regulations should ensure our air is safe.

“Air is tricky. You can choose to not partake of the water or the snacks on the table, but you can’t just abstain from breathing,” 

The COVID-causing virus SARS-CoV-2 is far from the only airborne risk in schools. There are also other respiratory viruses, smoke from wildfires, mold spores, off-gassing from plastics and other compounds, air pollution from traffic and industry, and allergens that worsen asthma and add to sick days. Yet federal air standards are stuck in the 1970s, when they were mostly aimed at protecting people from secondhand tobacco smoke

A sweat-powered wearable has the potential to make continuous, personalized health monitoring as effortless as wearing a Band-Aid. Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed an electronic finger wrap that monitors vital chemical levels—such as glucose, vitamins, and even drugs—present in the same fingertip sweat from which it derives its energy.

While flames may be the most visual wildfire danger, experts say smoke and fire retardant slurry can have long-lasting effects on human health and the environment.

New research has linked wildfire smoke exposure to higher rates of dementia, reproductive health issues and lung and heart disease, and forest service employees say the iconic, red fire retardant slurry dropped out of planes has been linked to thousands of fish kills.

Recent studies have linked wildfire smoke exposure to increased cases of the flu, decreases in lung function, and higher rates of depression, anxiety and dementia.

The increase in influenza cases was first noticed after a bad wildfire season several years ago, and researchers believe that exposure to wildfire smoke may have made people's lungs more susceptible to infection when exposed to the virus.

Health, environmental impacts of fire retardant

Wildfire retardants contain about 85% water, 10% ammonium phosphate fertilizer and 5% minor ingredients—including a colorant to help pilots see where the slurry has already been dropped.

It's bad for the environment when it's dumped into water because the ammonium phosphate turns into ammonia and ammonia is highly toxic to fish,"