Today’s Image of the Week: Cynobacteria!
Via “Microbiology and Immunology”
“Abstract art or fossilized stromatolite? Can’t it be both?
This image of the accumulations of cyanobacteria on a substrate at 12.5x magnification was taken by Douglas Moore of University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point and was awarded an honorable mention in Nikon’s Small World 2012 Photomicrography Competition.” http://bit.ly/10APB0h
By: Dr. Trevor Thrall
A bipartisan group of senators called on President Obama last week to take military action in Syria. The suggestions ranged from arming the “right rebels” to missile strikes. Senator John McCain argued that it would not be long before Assad decided to use chemical weapons again and that the U.S. could use precision strikes against Syria’s chemical weapons and ballistic missiles.
Given the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons and the escalating price of the war in Syria, the increased interest in U.S. intervention is understandable. But to succeed in Syria Obama will need to find three things that are likely to prove elusive.
First, Obama needs to find Syria’s chemical weapons. Given how portable they are and the difficulty the world has had in pinning down who used them in the first place, the idea of a targeted effort to reclaim them seems Quixotic at best. Beyond that, you can’t use missiles to get rid of chemical weapons without endangering everyone in the area – McCain should know better.
Second, Obama needs to fight a group of rebels worth arming. The difficulty of predicting which group will wind up aligned with U.S. interests should be obvious given America’s history.
Third, Obama needs to find a reason why getting more deeply involved is truly in the U.S. national interest. Taking the next step, whether by backing a specific rebel group or by launching missile strikes, seems very likely to ensure that the U.S. will wind up even more deeply engaged down the road with the U.S. eventually having to take responsibility for getting rid of Assad. That job, however, cannot be completed without boots on the ground. And in spite of increasing pressure from Congress, vague concerns about spillover effects and the possibility of an Islamist regime will not provide Obama with enough to convince the American public to launch a costly engagement in Syria.
Highlights include a possible bioterrorist threat to US water supplies, novel coronavirus in France, EUA authorization for H7N9 diagnostic kits, using bacteria to stop malaria, and money for the NBAF. Happy Friday!
Tunisian Is Accused of Proposing Contamination of Water or Air in U.S.
Mr. Ahmed Abassi has been charged with falsifying visa applicant information in order to facilitate terrorism. In recorded conversations with an undercover FBI agent, Abassi describes intentions to use a bacterial pathogen to contaminate air or water supplies. It is unknown whether Abassi possesses the necessary training to do so. Abassi has denied all charges brought against him.
The New York Times – “A Tunisian man has been accused of seeking to develop a terrorist network in the United States and of proposing to poison the water or air to kill up to 100,000 people, federal prosecutors said in court papers unsealed on Thursday. The man, Ahmed Abassi, 26, who came to the United States from Canada in March and was arrested last month at Kennedy International Airport, told the authorities that he may also have ‘radicalized’ one of two men arrested recently in Canada in an alleged Qaeda-linked plot to derail a passenger train.”
France Probes 3 Suspected Cases of SARS-Like Virus
In what seems indicative of limited person-to-person spread, two people in close contact with France’s first case of the novel coronavirus are believed to be infected with the virus themselves. The first French case become symptomatic following an excursion in Dubai. The hcov-EMC virus, a cousin of SARS, emerged in the Middle East last September, and caused 18 fatalities out of 30 confirmed cases. Cases of the virus have been seen across the Middle East, as well as the United Kingdom and Germany.
ABC News – “Since the virus emerged last year, European authorities have put in place monitoring measures. In France, 20 people have already been examined for suspected cases of the virus, but the other 19 turned up negative, Health Minister Marisol Touraine said. Beatrice Degrugillers, a spokeswoman for the regional health agency in France’s Nord-Pas-de-Calais region, said a nurse at the hospital where the man was hospitalized in late April has herself been under watch at the hospital in Douai since Thursday night….A doctor and a former hospital roommate who had each been in contact with the first patient also remain hospitalized. Test results are expected later Friday.”
US invokes emergency act to keep H7N9 flu at bay
Following a declaration that the H7N9 strain of influenza poses a “significant potential for a public health emergency”, the US government has granted emergency use authorization (EUA) for certain portable diagnostic detection kits for the virus. EUA authorization enables the kits to be used immediately in the field without securing prior FDA approval. Clearly we’re all keep a very close eye on the strain’s spread.
New Scientist – “”They are right to be concerned. H7N9 could be a tough adversary: New Scientist has learned that it provokes a weaker immune response than most flu, making vaccines hard to produce. Although H7N9 is not, so far, transmissible between humans, it does cause severe disease in people, is easier to catch than other bird flu strains, and may need only a few mutations to go pandemic. The UK has already given doctors instructions on when to test people for H7N9, and how to manage any with the virus.”
Using Bacteria To Swat Malaria Inside Mosquitoes
Well, it’s definitely innovative. Scientists have shown that infecting mosquitoes with Wolbachia renders them temporarily resistant to malaria. But before we all start throwing our malaria pills by the wayside, there are a couple little problems with this fix. The first is rounding all the mosquites up to infect them with the bacteria in the first place. The second is the inability of Wolbachia to confer lasting resistance. Scientists have managed to mitigate both concerns be engineering a mosquito capable of maintaining and spreading Wolbachia throughout it’s lifetime. Very cool, and possibly very useful.
NPR – “‘Groups have been trying to do this for more than 10 years,’ microbiologist George Dimopoulos, from the Johns Hopkins Malaria Institute, tells Shots. ‘So it’s a landmark achievement.’ The findings, reported Thursday in the journal Science, raise the possibility of one day controlling malaria with the bacteria.’You could just release large number of infected females and establish Wolbachia in a mosquito population…Gradually it would convert a malaria-spreading population to a non-spreading one.’ Specifically, Dimopoulos and his colleagues got Wolbachia to take up permanent residency inside Anopheles stephensi mosquito, the major malaria transmitter in South Asia and the Middle East.”
After hesitating, Kan. House panel OKs NBAF bonds
The Kansas state legislature has approved bonds supporting the construction of the National Bio- and Agr0-Defense Facility at Kansas State University. The new lab would replace the current agricultural lab located on Plum Island, off New York. The primary goal of the NBAF would be to research highly infectious animal pathogen like foot-and-mouth, in the hopes of further ensuring our nation’s agricultural security.
SF Gate – “Kansas has already authorized $105 million in bonds to help finance the project. State officials expect the lab to create more than 300 new jobs averaging more than $75,000 in salary and benefits.President Barack Obama’s latest proposed federal budget includes $714 million for the new lab. Both the Senate’s bill and the House committee’s plan would prevent the state from issuing the new bonds until the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has signed its contract with the construction company that will build the lab. Also, the federal government would be on the hook for construction cost overruns.”
FAS President Dr. Charles Ferguson is giving the keynote speech at the VIP Global Net, LLC “Countering Nuclear and Radiological Threats” Symposium next week.
The symposium will bring together experts the government, academic, and industry spheres, including from the National Security Staff, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense, and the Department of Energy, to discuss the the policy, operations, acquisition, and technical challenges associated with nuclear and radiological threats facing the United States today.
The symposium seeks to generate productive and pragmatic dialogue amongst all stakeholders regarding the nuclear and radiological threats faced by the US today.
Nonproliferation Law and Policy Mr. Chris Bidwell, JD will also speak at the symposium.
Featured speakers and agenda can be found here.
To register for the symposium click here.
About Charles Ferguson: Dr. Ferguson has been President of FAS since January of 2010. He brings to the symposium extensive experience in the nuclear and radiological field. Prior to FAS, Dr. Ferguson served as the s the project director of the Independent Task Force on U.S. Nuclear Weapons Policy, as the scientist-in-residence at the Monterey Institute’s Center for Nonproliferation Studies, and as a physical scientist at the Office of the Senior Coordinator for Nuclear Safety at the U.S. Department of State. He also authored the book, The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism, and was lead author of the award-winning report “Commercial Radioactive Sources: Surveying the Security Risks”.
For his complete bio, including recent publications and media appearances, please see here.
Image of the Week: Chemical weapons in WWI
While we attempt to figure out who is using what in Syria, let’s stop and look at this very frightening (and quotidian) image of chemical weapons use in WWI. The below picture, showing the Russian trenches as a German gas attacks drifts in, was printed in the New York Times in 1919.
(image courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Don’t forget the Biodefense Brown Bag, “WMD” Terrorism? Ricin, Boston, and Beyond, is this Thursday at 1:30PM in the PIA Conference room! Join us for a discussion with the faculty and students from the GMU graduate program in Biodefense. What is ricin? How afraid should we be of bioterrorism? Does ricin count as WMD? What about the pressure cooker bombs used by the Boston bombers? Should the U.S. government really be prosecuting Tsarnaev for using WMD? What are WMD and why does the answer matter?
We will discuss these and other important questions – bring your lunch and bring your questions!
Tuesday, May 7th
Does Spraying for Mosquitos Discourage Use of Nets? A Surprise Result from an RCT in Eritrea
Center for Global Development
12:00pm to 1:30pm
Does indoor residual spraying (IRS) for mosquitos discourage the use of bed nets, as some critics have alleged? A new paper from Pedro Carneiro and others using data from a randomized control trial in Eritrea finds the opposite: IRS actually encouraged net acquisition and use. Carneiro will present the findings and discuss the implications for the wider debate about under what conditions public health interventions crowd out private health investments.
Wednesday, May 8th
Case Study: Regulating the Private Health Sector in Afghanistan
O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law
12:00pm – 1:00pm
Afghanistan is transitioning from a system in which government provides services to one in which government is the regulator of a changing public health care system and a new emerging private health sector. In the years since the Taliban era ended, the Government of Afghanistan has taken many steps to encourage the development of a market economy and in 2012 its Cabinet passed a law to regulate the private health sector.Since last year, Professor Forzley has been working as a consultant and legal advisor to assist the Afghanistan MoPH to implement the new law in accordance with rule of law and good governance principles. Her presentation will cover a background on Afghanistan, its health system and the new private sector, the main functions of the new law, how procedures and systems are being developed to reflect good governance principle and future planned work.
Thursday, May 9th
“WMD” Terrorism? Ricin, Boston, and Beyond
PIA Conference Room 251, Robinson Hall A, George Mason University
1:30 PM – 3:00PM
Bring your lunch and join us for a discussion on the ricin letters, Boston bombings, and the use of the word “WMD”.
U.S.-Russia Relations: “Reset Button” must include closer cooperation on Counterterrorism
American Foreign Policy Council
6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
…[T]he U.S. has now inherited one of Russia’s principal threats, Chechen terrorists. The Chechen connection to the Boston Marathon twin IED explosions has thrust U.S.-Russia counterterrorism cooperation back into the spotlight. Did the FBI drop the ball on intelligence provided by Russia on Tamerlan Tsarnaev in 2011 or have Putin’s autocratic actions against Russian dissidents undercut the credibility of his intelligence services? Or both?
Friday, May 10th
Mitigating Natural Disasters, Promoting Development: The Sendai Dialogue and Disaster Risk Management in Asia
Brookings Institution
10:00 AM – 5:00 PM
On May 10, the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies and the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement will co-host a discussion featuring experts on natural disasters and disaster risk management from the United States and Asia. Panelists representing the private, public, and international sectors will seek to refine some of the topics considered at the Sendai Dialogue. They will identify the lessons learned from 3/11; how these lessons can be applied to overseas economic assistance programs, focusing on DRM; the specific challenges of disaster risk management among Asian countries; and how DRM can be integrated and mainstreamed into development assistance across different platforms.
After each panel, the speakers will take audience questions.
Highlights include the dangerous mixing of H5N1 and H1N1 in a vet lab, developments in the ricin case, the novel coronvirus kills five more, the NYPD’s upcoming bioterror drill, and combating MDR bacteria by giving doctors forms. Happy Friday!
There has been widespread outcry in the scientific community following publication of a Chinese research study in which the scientists recombined H5N1 with the highly infectious H1N1, in a veterinary laboratory. Look, there is gain-of-function research which contributes to vaccine development or a better understanding of the strain’s possible pathogenicity, and then there’s gain-of-function research which is just tempting fate. Even amongst those scientists who admired the difficulty of the experiment, there was criticism – “It’s a fabulous piece of virology by the Chinese group and it’s very impressive,” said Professor Wain-Hobson, a renowned virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, “but they haven’t been thinking clearly about what they are doing. It’s very worrying.” It would be tremendously ironic to be wiped out by a strain of flu created with the purported intention of helping stop us being wiped out by the very same strain of flu.
The Independent – “Senior scientists have criticised the “appalling irresponsibility” of researchers in China who have deliberately created new strains of influenza virus in a veterinary laboratory.They warned there is a danger that the new viral strains created by mixing bird-flu virus with human influenza could escape from the laboratory to cause a global pandemic killing millions of people.”
“Lord May of Oxford, a former government chief scientist and past president of the Royal Society, denounced the study published today in the journal Science as doing nothing to further the understanding and prevention of flu pandemics.’They claim they are doing this to help develop vaccines and such like. In fact the real reason is that they are driven by blind ambition with no common sense whatsoever,’ Lord May told The Independent.”
Miss. ricin-letters case headed to grand jury
Following the exoneration of Kevin Paul Curtis, the new suspect in the ricin letters is James Everett Dutschke. Dutschke will face a grand jury in the coming weeks. Investigators linked Dutschke to the case after discovering a dust mask containing traces of ricin and Dutschke’s DNA. For a full analysis of the ricin case, as well as the Boston bombings, and other “WMD” terrorism, check out the GMU Biodefense Brown Bag Event next Thursday.
USA Today – “Agents also revealed that the FBI was granted a search warrant for a location outside Dutschke’s home where he may have stored some of his possessions. Officials said they think a printer tied to the letters is at that location. Magistrate Judge S. Allan Alexander ruled that authorities had enough probable cause to send the case to a grand jury. It’s not clear when one would hear evidence in this case.”
Five die of SARS-like virus in Saudi Arabia
The novel coronavirus hCoV-EMC killed another 5 people in Saudi Arabia, bringing the total number of fatalities to sixteen out of 23 total cases. Although similar to SARS, hCoV-EMC targets the kidney, causing rapid failure. However, unlike SARS, the virus does not appear to transmit well person-to-person.
Al Jazeera – “In a statement cited by the Saudi SPA agency late on Wednesday, the ministry said that all the deaths occurred in the Ahsaa province in the oil-rich eastern region of the kingdom, according to the AFP news agency. Known as novel coronavirus or hCoV-EMC, the virus was first detected in mid-2012 and is a cousin of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which triggered a scare 10 years ago when it erupted in east Asia, leaping to humans from animal hosts…the ministry gave no figures for how many people have been examined to see if they have the lethal disease”
NYPD will release harmless gas into subway in bio/chem terror response drill
The NYPD, in coordination with the Brookhaven National Laboratory, will conduct experiments involving “tracer gases” this summer to monitor their dissipation speed. It is hoped the experiments will lead to better bio- and chemical detection systems. Don’t ask us why the Russian news has the most detailed coverage of this story (joke, little joke).
RT– “The police will use roughly 200 detectors to monitor the gas. Dubbed the Subway-Surface Air Flow Exchange, the test will be the largest of its kind and organized in cooperation with the energy department’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. They’ll use perfluorocarbon tracer gases (PFTs), which are frequently used to measure potential sites for underground construction…’The NYPD works for the best but plans for the worst when it comes to potentially catastrophic attacks such as ones employing radiological contaminants or weaponized anthrax,’ police commissioner Ray Kelly said in a statement”
Programs to reduce antibiotic use often work
Apparently introducing extra paperwork is enough to deter doctors from prescribing antibiotics, resulting in a measurable decrease in drug-resistant bacteria in hospitals in just six months. However, by continues education and persuasion, the same decrease in drug-resistant bacteria can be seen within a year. Questions of suggesting extra paperwork as a viable reform measure aside, it makes some sense that the best the way to combat antibiotic resistance would be to start with the doctors.
Reuters – “For the new review, Davey and his colleagues searched medical research databases for high-quality studies that evaluated whether hospital programs to curb the number of antibiotics doctors prescribed worked, didn’t harm patients and reduced the number of drug-resistant bacteria detected or the number of antibiotic-related infections. In the 89 studies from 19 different countries the researchers found, three types of programs were evaluated…Overall, programs that restricted a doctor’s ability to prescribe antibiotics were 32 percent more effective in the first month than those that tried to persuade and educate…After six months, restrictive programs also did a better job at reducing drug-resistant bacteria and antibiotic-related infections, compared to the persuasive programs.”
“WMD” Terrorism? Ricin, Boston, and Beyond
When: Thursday, May 9th 1:3o – 3:00 PM
Where: Public and International Affairs Conference Room, Room 251, Robinson Hall A, GMU
Join us for Biodefense Brown Bag discussion with the faculty and students from the GMU graduate program in Biodefense. What is ricin? How scared should we be about bioterrorism? Does ricin count as WMD? What about the pressure cooker bombs used by the Boston bombers? Should the U.S. government really be prosecuting Tsarnaev for using WMD? What is WMD and why does the answer matter?
We will discuss these and other important questions – bring your lunch and bring your questions!
For more info email Siddha Hover, shover@masonlive.gmu.edu
This week’s image is brought to you via the ATCC 2013 photo contest. We give you – blood agar! (Twenty points if you can remember which bug prefers this most gruesome of mediums)
Depicted above is “Black-pigmented Porphyromonas gingivalis in blood-agar plates”. This photograph sadly doesn’t look like it has a good chance of winning, but it’s up against some stiff competition (who knew HeLa cells were so cute?) Head over to the gallery and check out the other entries here.
The Pandora Report 