Last month's talks to mitigate global warming may have flopped, but this week brought some consolation to those concerned about the planet's environmental health: the first-ever global agreement to abolish a class of dangerous industrial chemicals. The treaty, finalized by representatives of 122 countries meeting in Johannesburg, South Africa, also spells out a process to determine the next chemicals to be proscribed.

DDT↗

PubMed2000

Infectious diseases. Has leishmaniasis become endemic in the U.S.?

Believed to be all but absent from United States, the Leishmania parasite has infected more than 1000 hunting dogs in 21 U.S. states and the Canadian province of Ontario. Nobody is claiming that the disease is about to run riot among the U.S. population. But the widespread outbreak in dogs has experts wondering whether visceral leishmaniasis--which sickens over half a million people yearly in South America, Africa, the Mediterranean, and India--has become an endemic disease in North America.

Animals↗

PubMed2000

Infectious disease. The enigma of West Nile. .

Fifteen months after the 1999 outbreak of West Nile virus in New York City, which sickened 62 mostly elderly people and killed seven, scientists are still hard pressed to predict how abundant the virus will eventually become or how serious a public health threat it will pose. This summer, the human toll has been relatively mild, with just 18 cases and one death. But the virus has been found in more than 60 bird species and about a dozen mammals; in a little more than a year, it has spread to 11 states along the East Coast and the District of Columbia. And with no natural barriers to stop it, scientists can safely say that it will keep spreading.

Animals↗

PubMed2000

Infectious disease. West Nile drugs, vaccine still years away.

With support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), several research groups are taking the first steps toward developing drugs to fight the acute phase of West Nile virus infection. NIH is also supporting the fast-track development of a vaccine. But because it doesn't make sense to vaccinate the entire population for such a rare disease, it is unclear how large the market for a vaccine will be.

Animals↗

PubMed2000

Bioethics. Helsinki's new clinical rules: fewer placebos, more disclosure.

After 3 years of intense debate, medical researchers and ethicists have agreed on international standards that would dramatically tighten the rules for clinical research and put new limitations on the risks to which patients may be exposed. Meeting in Edinburgh, U.K., on 7 October, the general assembly of the World Medical Association voted to approve a revised version of the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki, the cornerstone of clinical research ethics, that reduces ambiguity in existing guidelines and could force changes in the design of future drug trials.

Bioethics↗

PubMed2000

Mosquito engineering. Building a disease-fighting mosquito.

With resistance against insecticides on the rise and a U.N.-backed push to phase out DDT, several labs have embarked on the most ambitious and futuristic of all approaches to combat malaria: They hope to replace billions and billions of mosquitoes in the world's endemic areas with new strains, created in the lab, that would be "refractory," or unable to transmit Plasmodium, the parasite that causes the disease. The idea is not that farfetched, these researchers claim.

Aedes↗

PubMed2000

Emerging diseases. New arenavirus blamed for recent deaths in California.

Researchers say a new virus that appears to cause hemorrhagic fever is endemic--but at very low levels--in the western United States. Last week, the California Department of Health Services announced that a recently discovered virus carried by wood rats and pack rats killed a 14-year-old girl in April; moreover, the department says, there's strong evidence that the virus has caused at least two other deaths within the last 14 months. Experts say there is no cause for alarm, however, as they believe it to be a rare event.

Adolescent↗