Due to climate and land use change, displaced mammals share ‘novel’ viruses with humans, pets & local wild life

Climate and land use change will provide novel opportunities for viral sharing among previously geographically-isolated species of wildlife

At least 10,000 virus species have the capacity to infect humans and the vast majority are circulating silently in wild mammals – bats account for the majority of novel viral sharing.

A study published in Nature earlier this week is first comprehensive assessment of how climate change will restructure the global mammalian virome (the total collection of viruses).

It estimates that in 2070 human population centres in equatorial Africa, south China, India and southeast Asia will overlap with ‘projected hotspots of cross-species viral transmission in wildlife’.

The work focusses on the journeys that species will undertake as they follow their habitats into new areas. As they encounter other mammals for the first time, the study estimates that they will share thousands of viruses.

These shifts bring greater opportunities for viruses like Ebola or coronaviruses to emerge in new areas, making them harder to track, affecting new types of animals, making it easier for viruses to jump across a “stepping stone” species into humans.

The study’s lead author Dr Colin Carlson, assistant research professor at the Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University, says: “The closest analogy is actually the risks we see in the wildlife trade. We worry about markets because bringing unhealthy animals together in unnatural combinations creates opportunities for this stepwise process of emergence—like how SARS jumped from bats to civets, then civets to people. But markets aren’t special anymore; in a changing climate, that kind of process will be the reality in nature just about everywhere.”

The study finds that this ecological transition may already be underway – and holding warming under 2 °C within the century will not reduce future viral sharing.

In his APHA SCIENCE blog, APHA’s Professor Richard Delahay, a Wildlife Biologist at the National Wildlife Management Centre, talks about the work being carried out on the potential role of wildlife in the epidemiology of SARS-CoV-2.

This electron microscope image made available by the U.S. National Institutes of Health shows a human T cell, indicates in blue, under attack by HIV, in yellow, the virus that causes AIDS

PHYS ORG  reports that a letter published in Ecology refers to another study, “Assessing the risk of human-to-wildlife pathogen transmission for conservation and public health“, which found one hundred different cases where diseases had undergone “spillback” from humans back into wild animals, similar to the way that SARS-CoV-2 has been able to spread in mink farms, zoo lions and tigers, and wild white-tailed deer.

Professor Delahay describes the global coronavirus pandemic as a disease event of unprecedented scale pointing out that the World Health Organisation Dashboard indicates that over 117 million people have already been infected worldwide. And since the onset of the pandemic, there have been many instances of human-to-animal transmission, mostly involving pet dogs and cats, but with some cases in zoos and mink farms.

 

 

 

.

 

 

Calls for a more humane vaccine policy

A personal message from a young Indian correspondent says “We are in the midst of a crisis in India and to be honest it’s terrifying to read the papers. The stories shared on social media are disturbing and our anxiety levels are abnormally high. I have lost so many friends and relatives of friends to Covid-19. We are so numb with the situation surrounding us that often it feels like we are in a midst of a nightmare… May the Almighty look after us all and heal the world”. 

The World Health Organisation has announced that though a billion vaccinations against Covid-19 have been administered worldwide just 0.3% of these have been given in low-income countries.

Médecins Sans Frontières has an Access Campaign which says there should be:

China, most of Asia and Latin America and Africa have supported the call for an intellectual property waiver for Covid treatments, a measure that would allow generic vaccine manufacture, which was proposed to the World Trade Organisation by India and South Africa last autumn.

But the United States, the European Union, Britain, Canada, Australia and Japan have been blocking the measure

Lobbyists employed by Big Pharma have stressed that sharing vaccine patents would risk revealing technological secrets to their rivals. They also say that the protection of intellectual property is essential to preserve the pharmaceutical companies’ large profit margins in order to fund future research and development.

The Covax scheme was set up last year to try to ensure fair access to vaccines among rich and poor nations

More than 49 million vaccine doses have been delivered through Covax so far, Ghana being the first country to receive Covax vaccines in February but the Director-General of the World Health Organization said in April that only 0.3% of the vaccines administered around the world so far had gone to people in low-income countries.

He has criticised wealthier nations for undermining Covax, accusing them of “gobbling up” the global vaccine supply by ordering many times more than they need for their own populations.

Low-income countries are hoping that a proposal to put that position under review put forward by the US president’s top trade official, attorney Katherine Tai, will allow the manufacturing and wider distribution of generic vaccines.

ABC reports she has stated that gaping inequities in access to COVID-19 vaccines between developed and developing countries were “completely unacceptable,” and that mistakes made in the global response to the HIV pandemic mustn’t be repeated.

Roundup glyphosate: risk of cancer to ‘exposed’ agricultural workers and gardeners

A huge mistake? The European Commission will formalise on 12 December Monday’s decision by member states to renew for five years the licence for the herbicide glyphosate.

Weasel words in the FT last week:

“Although the World Health Organization last year said the herbicide was “probably carcinogenic”, the latest joint assessment by UN agencies concludes there is no risk to humans from exposure through the diet” – implying that evidence shows that the use of the herbicide is risk free.

In May last year, the UN agencies said:

“The overall weight of evidence indicates that administration of glyphosate and its formulation products at doses as high as 2000 mg/kg body weight by the oral route, the route most relevant to human dietary exposure, was not associated with genotoxic effects in an overwhelming majority of studies conducted in mammals, a model considered to be appropriate for assessing genotoxic risks to humans. The meeting concluded that glyphosate is unlikely to be genotoxic at anticipated dietary exposures” (emphasis added).

Dr Christopher Connolly, a reader in neurobiology at the University of Dundee, said in an article in the Science Media Centre journal: “The evidence on the risk to human health from glyphosate is highly controversial, making it difficult for politicians to make a sound science-based decision. It is alarming that it is so ubiquitous that it is found commonly in human urine. We must make the next five years count, so that an evidence-based decision may be made at the end of this period.

Prof. David Coggon, Professor of Occupational and Environmental Medicine at the University of Southampton, said:

“IARC classified glyphosate as probably having the potential to cause cancer in humans. This was based on evidence of carcinogenicity in animals and suggestions of an association with lymphoma in exposed people (mainly agricultural workers, landscapers, nursery workers and home gardeners).

Cancer incidence among glyphosate-exposed pesticide applicators in the Agricultural Health Study (2005)

Summary:

We evaluated associations between glyphosate exposure and cancer incidence in the Agricultural Health Study (AHS), a prospective cohort study of 57,311 licensed pesticide applicators in Iowa and North Carolina. There was a suggested association with multiple myeloma incidence (a type of bone marrow cancer) that should be followed up as more cases occur in the AHS. Given the widespread use of glyphosate, future analyses of the AHS will allow further examination of long-term health effects, including less common cancers.

The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer in March 2015 said that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans” (PDF), adding “The evidence in humans is from studies of exposures, mostly agricultural, in the USA, Canada, and Sweden published since 2001”.

The latest news was reported by CNN in May this year, opening with story of Christine Sheppard

For 12 years, she had no idea what might have caused her non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma — until the IARC reported that glyphosate, the key ingredient in the weed killer Roundup, is probably carcinogenic. Roundup is the herbicide she sprayed on her coffee farm in Hawaii for five years.

That report spurred hundreds of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma patients to sue Monsanto. Timothy Litzenburg’s law firm represents more than 500 of them. He said most of the patients didn’t know about a possible link between Roundup and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma until the report came out.

Other companies also sell products containing glyphosate, why target Monsanto?

Litzenburg points out that Monsanto invented Roundup, they held the patent for many years, they are the EPA registrant for glyphosate, and they continue to dominate the market, adding:

“We are not alleging that our clients got cancer from glyphosate alone. We are suing because our clients got cancer from Roundup. … Roundup contains animal fats and other ingredients that increase the carcinogenicity of the glyphosate.”

Though UN agencies concluded that as yet no risk to humans from exposure through diet has been found, studies find that workers and gardeners using Roundup risk contracting non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and multiple myeloma (a type of bone marrow cancer) – surely sufficient reason to withdraw the herbicide from use.

Media reports, including by EUobserver and Dutch magazine OneWorld, have shown that Efsa conclusions on the safety of glyphosate were partially based on scientific evidence provided by Monsanto, Roundup’s manufacturer. On 19 October, also the European Parliament expressed doubts over the scientific evaluations of glyphosate carried out by the European agencies.

Despite these findings, the European Commission will formalise on 12 December a decision by member states to renew the licence for the herbicide glyphosate for five years: https://euobserver.com/environment/140065.

Will Brexit give people in this country the opportunity to denounce the use of this and other dangerous substances and technologies and bring about beneficial change?

 

 

 

m

 

 

Crunch time: will fears of legal action by Monsanto sway the final vote on licensing glyphosate – a ‘probable’ carcinogen?

The FT reports that leading EU member states on Monday refused to extend a licence for glyphosate, the world’s most common herbicide. If there is no decision by the end of the month, glyphosate will lose its licence, raising the prospect of legal action by the industry.

The commission had intended to try to relicense glyphosate for 15 years, but the latest proposal was for a licence of only 12 to 18 months, while more research is conducted. This option has been rejected as Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Austria and Portugal and Luxembourg all abstained, meaning the necessary qualified majority could not be reached. Malta voted against.

Bart Staes, a Belgian MEP from the Green Party, warned the commission not to approve glyphosate unilaterally through a so-called “appeals committee”: “Such a move would raise major democratic concerns about the EU’s decision-making process”. More handsomely, the Guardian adds more from Staes:

“We applaud those EU governments who are sticking to their guns and refusing to authorise this controversial toxic herbicide. There are clear concerns about the health risks with glyphosate, both as regards it being a carcinogen and an endocrine disruptor. Moreover, glyphosate’s devastating impact on biodiversity should have already led to its ban”.

Glyphosate is the basis for Monsanto’s topselling weedkiller RoundUp, described in its annual report as “a sustainable source” of cash and profit. Last year more than 80% of Monsanto’s sales were in the Americas and under 13% in Europe.

Last month a report from the WHO and the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation concluded that the chemical was “unlikely to pose a carcinogenic risk” through diet, but the WHO’s cancer agency last year had concluded that the product was “probably carcinogenic to humans”.

Prime movers in opposing the use of glyphosate are Sweden, the Netherlands and France – and over 1.5 million EU citizens who petitioned the parliament to ban it.

The German Social democrat environment minister Barbara Hendricks welcomed the decision in Brussels, saying: “Many member states would like the question of cancer risks to be clarified before glyphosate can again be spread on our fields.” But Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative CDU/CSU bloc, which wants the chemical to remain in use, is frustrated. Peter Liese, a CDU member of the European Parliament, said Berlin must battle for the continued use of glyphosate, albeit under “strict conditions”.

The glyphosate task force, a consortium of companies including Monsanto, complained: “It is clear that certain member states are no longer basing their positions on scientific evidence, which is meant to be the guiding principle of the process”.

US officials said that they are “extremely concerned” about the EU’s action and accuse Brussels of failing to rely on “sound science”. EU officials respond that their “precautionary principle” of regulation in cases of doubt offers greater public protection.

 

 

 

Will the destructive profit motive triumph in Europe, even as America – beset by high rates of cancer, heart disease and obesity – imports GM free foods?

In April Bloomberg business news carried news of American consumers increasingly seeking milk and food products free of GM ingredients and of the surge in GM-free imports – 33% imported from sensible Romania where many communes and four cities have declared themselves GMO-free. In an increasingly urgent quest to restore profit, the BBC reports that the Beijing News and the Beijing Times, urge Chinese shoppers to “discard their prejudice” against GM foods as part of a government campaign. An online search will show many reports that imports of GM food have been rejected or ‘approval suspended’ by China, Japan, South Korea and Russia.

So the industry turns yet again to Europe. On the sadly emasculated Farming Today radio programme, a spokesman with a clear vested interest (see endnote) says that it’s now ‘morally wrong’ not to allow farmers to use GM technology to feed a growing population.

Are Monsanto’s insecticides and herbicides beyond reproach?

One argument on the blurb is that farming that relies on pesticides is no longer acceptable. It fails to mention insect resistance to use of Monsanto’s insecticides and the fact that Monsanto’s seeds rely on the use of its herbicide Roundup (toxic glyphosate) which a report published recently in the journal Lancet Oncology, by researchers for WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, said was probably carcinogenic to humans, farmers, forestry workers and domestic gardeners – a damaging conclusion which Monsanto has called on WHO to retract.

In addition to this health concern there is the environmental and agricultural problem recorded earlier on this site, which carried recent news of Monsanto’s reduced profits due to increasing weed resistance to Roundup; USDA records that 14 glyphosate resistant weed species have been documented in the US.

Lying by implication – the writer has been driven to capitalise for emphasis

Representations made on the BBC website by Stephen Tindale:

• scientists should be able to develop GM technology – whereas there are BATTALIONS of highly paid scientists doing just that;

• those who oppose it presented as weak-minded idiots. Campaigners are reported as saying – on the blurb – that not enough is yet known about its potential harm to the environment and the public – whereas there are MASSES of evidence of potential harm; for one example see links to WHO and USDA evidence of weed resistance.

How often must all these tired allegations be refuted? Will campaigners eventually cease though sheer boredom (the writer is wilting) – and will the destructive profit motive triumph?

–

In 2005 after leaving Greenpeace, Stephen Tindale announced his support for nuclear power and GM crop technology. He co-founded ‘currently unfunded’ Climate Answers, has been a consultant for RWE, one of Europe’s five leading companies, generating electricity from gas, coal, nuclear and renewables, and is an Associate Fellow at the Centre for European Reform in which corporate donor, Bayer, represents GM interests.

–