Culture change needed to avert disaster risk
A CULTURE change is needed if the benefits of development, such as new jobs and hospitals, are not to be destroyed in future natural disasters, according to a report released today in London. The report, ‘Reducing Risks of Future Disasters: Priorities for Decision Makers’, published by the UK government, calls on all development stakeholders — including aid and development funders, governments and industry — to consider the implications of their actions on disaster risk and to routinely use the best available evidence on the threat of disasters to inform their decisions. More concerted action is needed to avert future disasters amid rising risks, the report says. It points out that earthquakes and emerging infectious diseases could have a particularly serious impact on megacities in the near future, as could stronger cyclones in developing countries. The report also calls for a repository of solutions that have successfully alleviated disaster risk, so that future developments can draw on a library of examples instead of implementing programmes that no-one can be certain will work. Angela McLean, chair of the report’s expert group and a professor at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, said the expert group was surprised by how little information there was about what works. Brendan Gormley, another member of the expert team, also highlighted the lack of systematic evidence on proven solutions. This is a challenge given that, over the next 30 years, many cities will build major infrastructure for the first time – and this is an opportunity to build disaster resilience, he said. The report, which examines the period up to 2040, was put together by the expert group based on 18 independently peer-reviewed papers and several expert meetings. Around 1.3 million people worldwide have died in natural disasters over the past 20 years, mostly drought, earthquakes and storms, the report says. The economic damage from these disasters is equivalent to the total that was spent on overseas development aid over these two decades — or US$2 trillion — it says. “This is a gross underestimate of the actual damage that disasters do,” John Beddington, chief scientific adviser for the UK government, said at the launch. This is because the indirect and long-term effects of disasters are poorly documented, he said. Beddington also highlighted the growing variability of weather — and the increasing number of extreme events — driven by climate change. McLean said that, in the next 30 years, scientists will get much better at knowing when, where and why many disasters happen. “Storms, floods and droughts could all be fairly reliably forecast within six days by 2040,” she said. (SciDev)
Injectable malaria to speed vaccine test
INJECTING HUMAN volunteers with malaria parasites instead of exposing them to live mosquitoes could speed up clinical trials of new treatments for the disease, researchers have reported. In usual trials people are exposed to infected mosquitoes, but it can be difficult to ensure that all receive the same dose of the infection. Now, researchers at the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre, Netherlands, have infected healthy volunteers with an injectable formulation of malaria parasites, potentially opening up a faster way to develop a malaria vaccine. The formulation is an “enabling technology” that can be manufactured on a large scale, says Stephen Hoffman, co-author of the study published in the American Journal of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “For the first time this will allow investigators in any clinical facility in the world to test malaria drugs. It is going to change the face of testing of these new products,” he says. Currently, five centres are looking at how best to administer the formulation. Researchers took 18 healthy volunteers, split them into three groups and gave them differing doses of Plasmodium falciparum parasites (sporozoites) that had been frozen. Fifteen volunteers, five from each of the three groups, became infected with the disease. As soon as parasites were detected in blood smears the volunteers were given anti-malaria drugs for three days and were confirmed malaria free. The sporozoites were harvested from the salivary glands of mosquitoes. The glands were dissected and the sporozoites were purified, bottled and then frozen in liquid nitrogen. Hoffman is also chief executive of Sanaria, a US-based biotechnology firm, which is looking at developing a vaccine by taking the sporozoites and irradiating them so they give people immunity but not malaria. Brian Greenwood, professor of clinical tropical medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and an expert on malaria, said that the injectable formulation is a major achievement. He added that using live mosquitoes is complicated as researchers have to ensure they are at the right stage of infection. (SciDev)