Danger Dust

Parasites take an enormous toll on human and veterinary health. But researchers may have found a way for patients with brain disorders and a common brain parasite to become frenemies.

Snot is one of the immune system’s efforts to ditch a virus, but how much we produce when sick is a slippery subject

When you’re struggling through a case of the common cold, the snot pouring from your nose seems endless. You go through countless tissues to mop up all the chunky, bright yellow boogers and thin, runny mucus, heaping up mountain ranges of used tissues.

And while you try to comfort yourself with hot soup and over-the-counter medications (many of which don’t do anything at all), a question pops into your head—how much mucus does someone actually produce while they’ve got a cold?

It must be enough to fill at least a coffee cup, you’re sure. Or a sink maybe? Or even a car? Surely someone must have attempted to measure this for the sake of sinus science.

As it turns out, only a few intrepid scientists have collected Kleenex for the common good. And from what these brave researchers have found so far, the amount of mucus produced through our valiant viral suffering may not be as much as we think.

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In the new study, the team conducted a meta-analysis of 170 studies, representing 4,670 participants from 29 countries. They included college #students, amateur #athletes, #engineers, #teachers, and those who work in a #military or #healthcare setting.

The team found that across all populations, the more mental effort a task required, the more study participants reported unpleasant feelings.

The authors note that studies on recovery from long COVID are “sparse and inconsistent.” But those that have closely evaluated individual manifestations of the virus have found recovery rates to be fairly low at one year, and only 7% to 10% fully recovered after two years. For millions and millions of people, the debilitating effects of long COVID are just that.

The economic toll is its own story. A Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey in 2022 found that between 2 million and 4 million working-age Americans were out of work because they were sidelined with the effects of long COVID. Meanwhile 20% of people with long COVID surveyed by the United Kingdom’s Trades Union Congress said they were not working. Another 16% were working reduced schedules.

The consultant in occupational lung diseases at the Royal Brompton Hospital added: “What’s really striking is it is affecting young people, in their 20s and 30s, and there’s no treatment for it.

“If they didn’t do their job, they wouldn’t have a disease, and it should be preventable. So we need urgent action.”

Dr Feary, who also works as a senior clinical research fellow at Imperial College London, told PA: “We’ve known about the problems associated with artificial stone silicosis from colleagues from around the world for the last few years, but we had not seen any confirmed cases in the UK until the middle of last year when they started arriving in my clinic.”

Doctors writing in Thorax, the journal of the British Thoracic Society, warn of a future ‘epidemic’ and call for action following first UK cases of silicosis from cutting artificial stone

The article is by a team of doctors associated with the first 8 cases of silicosis – an irreversible lung disease – in UK workers who inhaled dust from cutting artificial stone (a composite material made from crushed stone bound by adhesive).

The use of artificial stone for kitchen worktops has increased in recent years. And this is leading to more workers involved in supply chains and installation being exposed to silica dust when the artificial stone is cut.

With the rapid growth in the use of artificial stone in the UK, the doctors say: “A concerted effort is required in the UK to prevent the epidemic seen in other countries.”

"I saw everything," says 74-year-old Harry Stackhouse from Illinois, who was awake during his recent kidney transplant. He felt no pain as he chatted with doctors, examined the donor organ, and watched the surgical team staple him back up.

Stackhouse was discharged just 36 hours after the procedure at Northwestern Medicine, which aims to make transplants without risky general anesthesia commonplace.

Performed in a little over an hour on July 15, this was the second such surgery led by Satish Nadig, director of the Chicago-based hospital system's Comprehensive Transplant Center. He has since carried out a third.

"We're at an inflection point in transplantation today in being able to use the technologies that we have around us to really push us into this next era," Nadig told AFP.

It may sound off-putting or even scary, but the medical benefits of using a spinal anesthetic for kidney transplants – similar to what's already done during cesarean sections – are well established.

Where you live has a relationship to your odds of getting cancer and surviving cancer. Epidemiologists studying this link they see in the data have focused on so-called social determinants of health — poor access to transportation, for example, could make it harder for residents to see a doctor. Places lacking grocery stores with fresh food could mean worse nutrition for locals.

Neighborhoods are like ecosystems in their complexity, with countless variables both small and large that could plausibly influence health and biology. For instance, the built environment, whether it has sidewalks or parks or polluting factories, and an area’s crime statistics could influence how easy it is for residents to exercise or spend time outdoors.

Affective sensitivity to air pollution (ASAP) describes the extent to which affect, or mood, fluctuates in accordance with daily changes in air pollution, which can vary between individuals, according to a study published August 7, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Michelle Ng from Stanford University, U.S., and colleagues.

Specifically, the authors applied statistical models to intensive repeated measures data obtained from 150 US individuals for more than a year. The researchers used the models to examine whether and how individuals' daily affective states fluctuate with the daily concentrations of outdoor air pollution in their county.

They looked at two components of individuals' affective state: arousal, the level of physiological activation, and valence, the positivity or negativity of their mood.

The work demonstrated the viability of using air pollution data obtained from local air quality monitors alongside psychological data to assess individuals' ASAP. The researchers found that individuals' affect arousal was lower than usual on days with higher than usual air pollution. Most importantly, there were substantial differences in ASAP between individuals.

The finding that individuals' day-to-day affect may be disrupted by air pollution has important implications.

Affective Sensitivity to Air Pollution (ASAP): Person-specific associations between daily air pollution and affective states

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0307430

Scotland has had a long association with the asbestos industry. Scottish entrepreneurs were among the pioneers in developing the manufacture of asbestos products, with the first companies appearing in the 1870s.

One account suggests that it was two Scottish businessmen who first introduced the mineral to the United Kingdom, establishing the Patent Asbestos Manufacturing Company in Glasgow to process asbestos, imported initially from Canada in 1871. Thereafter growth was rapid as the potential of the manufactured mineral began to be realised. By 1885 there were at least 19 asbestos manufacturers and distributors in Glasgow and a further handful dotted around Lanarkshire. The number of companies increased, and at the turn of the century 52 were listed as "asbestos manufacturers" in the Glasgow Post Office Directory.

The importance of the industry in Clydeside in this early period is suggested by the fact that of 18 asbestos companies (undoubtedly the largest) listed in a UK Trade Directory in 1884, six were located in Glasgow.

Among the main exposure points in Scotland were the shipyards; marine engineering; locomotive construction, motor engineering, maintenance, and repair (friction products such as clutch and brake linings); the oil refineries in Grangemouth; heating engineering (including storage heater construction); and electrical engineering. In the shipyards asbestos was used to insulate boilers and pipes and as a fire retardant to comply with increasingly strict fire-prevention regulations.

The extent of the exposure can be gauged from the fact that there were 42 shipbuilding and ship-repairing yards in Scotland in 1960-32 of which were located on Clydeside.

The number of pathogens that could trigger the next pandemic has grown to more than 30, and now includes influenza A virus, dengue virus and monkeypox virus, according to an updated list published by the World Health Organization (WHO) last week. Researchers say that the list of ‘priority pathogens’ will help organizations to decide where to focus their efforts in developing treatments, vaccines and diagnostics.

The priority pathogens, published in a report on 30 July, were selected for their potential to cause a global public-health emergency in people, such as a pandemic. This was on the basis of evidence showing that the pathogens were highly transmissible and virulent, and that there was limited access to vaccines and treatments. The WHO’s two previous efforts, in 2017 and 2018, identified roughly a dozen priority pathogens.

Almost 500 different chemicals, some of which are banned, have been found in various mixtures across all 171 river and groundwater catchments tested in England in 2024, according to data from the Environment Agency, analysed by the Guardian and Watershed Investigations.

More than half of them are classified as very toxic, toxic or harmful to aquatic life, according to the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), and a banned, carcinogenic “forever chemical” was among 20 “substances of very high concern” found.

“Although it depends on the concentrations, a lot of these are very toxic. We know they target algae, invertebrates and fish. If you’ve got a mixture of a few hundred substances, they are potentially working together and exacerbating the effect,” explained Boxall.

Environmental groups have called chemical pollution the silent killer in our waterways. The world has lost 83% of its freshwater aquatic life in 50 years and in UK waters, the sturgeon and the burbot have vanished and Atlantic salmon is endangered.

DANGERS: People can inhale the free crystalline silica found in powder products, prolonged exposure to which could put users at risk of lung cancer, an academic said

Most countries do not ban or limit the use of crystalline silica in cosmetics, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said, adding that it would continue to reference international regulations and revise regulations accordingly.

The agency issued the remarks after an academic suggested banning or limiting the mineral’s use to reduce risk of lung cancer in women.

Kou said most people have very low exposure to crystalline silica in the environment, but miners or people who work in stone cutting or processing, casting and refractory brick production might often be exposed to it, and the government has set exposure limits.

However, crystalline silica is used in cosmetic products to absorb oil and reflect light, which makes the skin look brighter and more delicate, he said.

It is easy to inhale as it is frequently used near the mouth and nose, which makes it more harmful, but there are no limitations to its use in cosmetic products.

Silicon dioxide, also known as silica, is found naturally in stone, sand, mud, dirt, air and water, and its common products include brick, glass, ceramic, plaster, granite, concrete, detergent, skin care and cosmetic products, the FDA said in response.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) listed respirable crystalline silica in the form of quartz or cristobalite dust as a human carcinogen, because inhaling it might increase the risk of developing lung cancer, the FDA said.

However, most cosmetic products are in the form of liquid or cream, so the risk of inhaling it is low, it said, adding that if people who use powder cosmetics should dab an appropriate amount of product and avoid patting it too hard on the face to reduce the risk of inhaling the powder.

For example, Likhitsup's group estimated that more than 11 million adults regularly take turmeric supplements, often with the notion that it can ease pain or arthritis. That's not too far below the approximately 14.8 million who take an NSAID pain reliever for much the same reasons.

Unfortunately, "multiple randomized clinical trials have failed to demonstrate any efficacy of turmeric-containing products in osteoarthritis," and overdoing it on turmeric has been linked to serious liver toxicity, the researchers said.

People taking botanicals were more likely to be battling some kind of chronic illness, such as arthritis, thyroid disorders or cancer, compared to folks not using the supplements.

In two-thirds of cases, people took a botanical while also taking a prescription medicine, the study found. Because of the danger of drug interactions and the threat to liver health, it's crucial that botanical users inform their doctors, Likhitsup's group said.

When botanicals are overused, the damage to the liver "can not only be severe, leading to hepatocellular [liver] injury with jaundice, but also fatal, leading to death or liver transplantation," the research team warned.

Intense blazes burning in the United States and Canada are creating their own thunderstorms, which can spark more fires.

The monstrous fires that are now charring vast areas of western North America aren’t just colossal and fast-moving, they have also created their own thunderstorms — an example of exotic fire behaviour that scientists say is becoming more common as the climate changes.

Both the Park Fire, which has burnt more than 160,000 hectares in northern California, and the Jasper Fire, which has destroyed around one-third of the resort town of Jasper in Canada, have spawned ‘pyrocumulonimbus’ clouds, towering formations that can spit lightning, potentially starting more fires.

Reports of such clouds were relatively uncommon in years gone by.

The technology involves assembling heat-absorbing bricks in an insulated container, where they can store heat generated by solar or wind power for later use at the temperatures required for industrial processes. The heat can then be released when needed by passing air through channels in the stacks of "firebricks," thus allowing cement, steel, glass, and paper factories to run on renewable energy even when wind and sunshine are unavailable.

These systems, which several companies have recently begun to commercialize for industrial heat storage, are a form of thermal energy storage. The bricks are made from the same materials as the insulating bricks that lined primitive kilns and iron-making furnaces thousands of years ago. To optimize for heat storage instead of insulation, the materials are combined in different amounts.

Aerosol particles are tiny. Swirling suspended in the air around us, most are smaller than the smallest bug, thinner than the thinnest hair on your head, gossamer specks practically invisible to the naked eye. Newly formed ones are nano-sized. Yet their influence is gargantuan.

They determine the color of sunsets. They inflict over three million premature deaths each year. And the power they hold over our climate is massive.

Aerosol particles come about in different ways. Some, known as primary aerosols, are ejected straight into the atmosphere, like dust from a desert or ash from a volcano. Others are born in the sky, products of gases that intermingle in the atmospheric milieu—these are the particles that claim the EAGLES team's attention.

New particles aren't born just anywhere; there are hotspots. Much of the action happens above forests, like the rainforests of the Central Amazon and Southeast Asia.

There, "clean" air free of primary aerosols allows for the right kind of chemical intermingling that gives way to new particles. Scientists have detected huge concentrations of new particles above these forests.

Global variability in atmospheric new particle formation mechanisms

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07547-1

Researchers at the University of Liège (Belgium) have discovered a new population of macrophages, important innate immune cells that populate the lungs after injury caused by respiratory viruses. These macrophages are instrumental in repairing the pulmonary alveoli.

This groundbreaking discovery promises to revolutionize our understanding of the post-infectious immune response and opens the door to new regenerative therapies.

Published: March 2021

Autoantibodies have been associated with both asbestos exposure and various cancers. Therefore, autoantibodies can be explored as markers of disease or markers of asbestos exposure.

In this study, the relationship between ANA and asbestos-associated cancers was examined, since amphibole asbestos exposures were shown to induce ANA, and because of some evidence that autoimmune responsiveness is associated with, and may play roles in, development of some cancers.

The current study found that those without a cancer diagnosis were significantly (5-fold) more likely to be positive for ANA than cancer patients. This was true for both lung cancer and mesothelioma patients.

Anti-nuclear autoantibodies are strongly associated with, and sometimes diagnostic for, systemic autoimmune diseases including systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), systemic sclerosis, Sjogren Syndrome, and mixed connective tissue disease.

Several investigators reported that ANA also occur in the serum of cancer patients, and the possibility that these autoantibodies may be related to DNA damage and cancer etiology.

Castor oil, which was once used by fascists in Italy as punishment because of its quick-acting laxative effect, is now a weight-loss trend on TikTok. Not drinking it, but rubbing it on your belly.

Influencers are also pouring it in their belly buttons and wrapping towels soaked in it around their midriff. They claim it can melt belly fat and help with bloating.

Castor oil – made from the beans of the castor plant – is an ancient medicine. References to it appear in an ancient Egyptian medical text called the Ebers Papyrus (1550BC). It was used as a laxative and to treat various skin conditions. Cleopatra is said to have used it in her hair and to brighten the whites of her eyes.

The odourless oil is rich in a fatty substance called ricinoleic acid that strongly stimulates bowel movements. 

It is always advised to apply a small amount of pure castor oil or a castor oil-containing cosmetic product onto a small patch of skin. If there is no allergic reaction after 24 hours, then it can be assumed that the product can be applied safely to a larger area of the body.

Ultimately, though, there are generally safer and better remedies out there. And rubbing it on your belly – sadly – won’t melt the fat.

Many of the world’s modern systems of public health surveillance have their origins in innovations Britain introduced in the mid-19th century, including continuous water supply, sewage filtration and routine governmental investigation of disease outbreaks.

And yet Britain has never managed to eradicate systemic failures when it comes to providing safe, clean and accessible drinking water to its citizens. To understand why not, we need to start by revisiting Britain’s major cholera and typhoid outbreaks of the 19th- and early 20th-century, which at their peaks killed hundreds of people every day.

‘The power of life and death’

The colossal power of life and death wielded by a water company supplying half a million customers is something for which, till recently, there has been no precedent in the history of the world. Such a power ought most sedulously to be guarded against abuse.

These prophetic words were written by the British government’s first ever chief medical officer, John Simon, in 1867. He was responding to one of the country’s worst water-related scandals: the 1866 cholera epidemic that killed 5,596 people in the East End of London.

Globally, the full-scale water privatisation of England and Wales remains an exception, other than for a few World Bank-led initiatives in developing economies. Most European countries have opted for a coexistence of private and public bodies.

In England and Wales, selling off water providers as regional monopolies led to unsustainable price hikes, with company after company prioritising shareholders over customers from the get-go.

They’re everywhere. Engineered stone kitchen countertops look good and cost less. But there’s a catch, says Hazards editor Rory O’Neill. The workers making them are being struck at frightening speed by lung-destroying silicosis. In parliament, the UK government insisted “nobody” has been harmed. But down the road, hospital lung specialists are telling a different story.

Over a century after the government first acknowledged it was an occupational disease, the UK is now far behind best practice on silicosis recognition and prevention, with evidence both exposure standards and systems for identifying cases may be dangerously lax.

A January 2023 report from the All Party Parliamentary Group for Respiratory Health urged the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) to look at “the data and technology needed to allow the UK to reduce the WEL [workplace exposure limit] for work with silica to 0.05mg/m3.”

It was a belated recognition from MPs that the UK’s 0.1mg/m3 standard may not be sufficiently protective. HSE admits there will be six times more silicosis cases if it sticks at this level, but has told Hazards repeatedly it has no intention of lowering it. Australia and the US, by contrast, have both completed multi-year consultations and introduced the more protective standard of 0.05mg/m3. In three years, Australia intends to follow global best practice and shift to 0.025mg/m3.

Extreme heat kills over 175,000 people a year in Europe, where temperatures are rising quicker than the rest of the globe, the World Health Organization's (WHO) European branch said Thursday.

Of the some 489,000 heat-related deaths recorded each year by the WHO between 2000 and 2019, the European region accounts for 36 percent or on average 176,040 deaths, the WHO said.

The health body noted that temperatures in the region are "rising at around twice the global average rate."

The WHO's European region comprises 53 countries, including several in Central Asia.

Temperature extremes exacerbate chronic conditions, including cardiovascular, respiratory and cerebro-vascular diseases, mental health, and diabetes-related conditions.

Some foods and alcohol

People who are intoxicated tend to put out more carbon dioxide and sweat more, which seems to attract mosquitoes—possibly along with other unknown factors.

Swiger said diet can also impact mosquito attraction, though the extent of its effect hasn't been fully explored. Garlic and vitamin B are often anecdotally reported to deter these bugs, but the evidence is limited.

However, Swiger said bananas and other high-potassium foods have shown to attract mosquitoes, perhaps because they lead to an increase in lactic acid production in the body, which helps mosquitoes locate animals.

This also impacts a person's skin microbiota, or the microorganisms living on the skin.

A taste for the local flavor

Sometimes mosquitoes develop more specific tastes in a location over time as an evolutionary trait.

"Mosquitoes in certain neighborhoods can become accustomed to specific scents and start to prefer those over others," Swiger said. "Their generations are about two weeks long, and urban mosquitoes that bite humans often don't travel far. As a result, they seem to get familiar with the local scents."

Different groups of TB bacteria exist worldwide with different regional distribution: some are generalists and can be found on many continents, others are very limited in their spread. An international team of researchers has now been able to show for the first time that the specialist strains spread more effectively among suitable hosts from the same geographical area, whereas generalist strains can spread in different host populations from a variety of geographical settings. The transmissibility of tuberculosis therefore depends not only on the pathogen or the host but also on their combination.