Clinical Microbiology and Infection Volume 21, Issue 5, May 2015, Pages 433-443;
The neglected zoonotic diseases (NZDs) have been all but eradicated in wealthier countries, but remain major causes of ill-health and mortality across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. This neglect is, in part, a conse...quence of under-reporting, resulting in an underestimation of their global burden that downgrades their relevance to policy-makers and funding agencies. Increasing awareness about the causes of NZDs and how they can be prevented could reduce the incidence of many endemic zoonoses.
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011 - Biogeochemical Cycles
In this video Paul Andersen explains how biogeochemical cycles move required nutrients through the abiotic and biotic spheres on our planet. Matter on the Earth is conserved so producers must receive required nutrients through the water cycle, carbon cycle, nitrogen c...ycle, phosphorus cycle, and sulfur cycle.
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Environmental Research Letters
Microplastic debris floating at the ocean surface can harm marine life. Understanding the severity of this harm requires knowledge of plastic abundance and distributions. Dozens of expeditions measuring microplastics have been carried out since the 1970s, but they ha...ve primarily focused on the North Atlantic and North Pacific accumulation zones, with much sparser coverage elsewhere. Here, we use the largest dataset of microplastic measurements assembled to date to assess the confidence we can have in global estimates of microplastic abundance and mass. We use a rigorous statistical framework to standardize a global dataset of plastic marine debris measured using surface-trawling plankton nets and coupled this with three different ocean circulation models to spatially interpolate the observations. Our estimates show that the accumulated number of microplastic particles in 2014 ranges from 15 to 51 trillion particles, weighing between 93 and 236 thousand metric tons, which is only approximately 1% of global plastic waste estimated to enter the ocean in the year 2010. These estimates are larger than previous global estimates, but vary widely because the scarcity of data in most of the world ocean, differences in model formulations, and fundamental knowledge gaps in the sources, transformations and fates of microplastics in the ocean.
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Briefing Note no. 80 November 2015
Promoting health and well-being throughout Europe
This is a book about community-based research in the service of improving the sustainability and equity of safe water production, consumption, and management at community level in rural Uganda. It provides an account of the findings of a five-year combined social science, natural science, and engine...ering research work programme (2009–14) which took place within and with the community, in the sense that the community identified their water needs and related their everyday struggles with water resourcing to the research team, and they contributed to the outcomes.
Free download of the ebook available
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Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) represents a major threat to human health with significant global economic and security implications. In 2015, WHO Member States unanimously approved a Global Action Plan to tackle AMR (GAP-AMR). The goal of GAP-AMR is “to ensure, for as long as possible, continuity ...of successful treatment and prevention of infectious diseases with effective and safe medicines that are quality-assured, used in a responsible way, and accessible to all who need them”.
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This guidance document is designed to ensure that the process of iteratively managing the health risks of climate change is integrated into the overall National Adaptation Planning (NAP) process, including through assessing risks; identifying, prioritizing, and implementing adaptation options; and m...onitoring and evaluating the adaptation process.
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Arbeitsblätter zum Globalen Klimawandel. Mit den vorliegenden Materialien können die SchülerInnen die Verknüpfung der Themenkomplexe Ernährungssicherheit und globaler Klimawandel erarbeiten. Diese in einer sich zunehmend globalisierenden und ständig wandelnden Welt verstärke...nden Zusammenhänge werden regional differenziert und vertiefend betrachtet
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Aktuelle Themen und perspektiven für eine gesundheitsfördernde stadtentwicklungWeltweit nimmt die Urbanisierung zu: Inzwischen lebt mehr als die Hälfte der Weltbevölkerung in Städten, in Europa sind es deutlich mehr als 70% der Bevölkerung (WHO, 2010a). Aufgrund die...ser Entwicklung hat sich »Urban Health« als neues Forschungsfeld etabliert, in dem der Einfluss der städtischen Umwelt auf die Gesundheit unter-sucht wird (Vlahov & Galea, 2003; Galea & Vlahov, 2005a; Heaton et al., 2010; Braür & Hystad, 2014).
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Read the full manifesto: http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...
Sign the manifesto: http://bit.ly/1cQReJ0
#PlanetaryHealth
This manifesto for transforming public health calls for a social movement to support collective public health action at all levels of society. Our aim is to respond to ...the threats we face: threats to human health and wellbeing, threats to the sustainability of our civilisation, and threats to the natural and human-made systems that support us.
Our vision is for a planet that nourishes and sustains the diversity of life with which we co-exist and on which we depend. Our goal is to create a movement for planetary health.
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Within an Australian context, the medium to long-term health impacts of climate change are likely to be wide, varied and amplify many existing disorders and health inequities. How the health system responds to these challenges will be best considered in the context of existing health facilities and ...services. This paper provides a snapshot of the understanding that Australian health planners have of the potential health impacts of climate change.
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Energy use in the home is a vital and ubiquitous feature of human society. Energy
is used for a wide variety of purposes, including cooking, space heating, light-
ing, small-scale income generation, various household tasks, and entertainment.
Providing improved water supply to low-income urban communities is a difficult challenge faced by water utilities throughout Africa and Asia.
This guide provides an introduction to available options for serving these communities.
The guide draws on sector experience in general, and more particular...ly on WSUP’s extensive experience of implementing urban WASH programmes in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere.
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PlosOne December 10, 2014 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0111913
Plastic pollution is ubiquitous throughout the marine environment, yet estimates of the global abundance and weight of floating plastics have lacked data, particularly from the Southern Hemisphere and remote regions. Here we re...port an estimate of the total number of plastic particles and their weight floating in the world's oceans from 24 expeditions (2007–2013) across all five sub-tropical gyres, costal Australia, Bay of Bengal and the Mediterranean Sea conducting surface net tows (N = 680) and visual survey transects of large plastic debris (N = 891). Using an oceanographic model of floating debris dispersal calibrated by our data, and correcting for wind-driven vertical mixing, we estimate a minimum of 5.25 trillion particles weighing 268,940 tons. When comparing between four size classes, two microplastic <4.75 mm and meso- and macroplastic >4.75 mm, a tremendous loss of microplastics is observed from the sea surface compared to expected rates of fragmentation, suggesting there are mechanisms at play that remove <4.75 mm plastic particles from the ocean surface.
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PNAS | March 4, 2014 | vol. 111 | no. 9
Malaria is an important disease that has a global distribution and significant health burden. The spatial limits of its distribution and seasonal activity are sensitive to climate factors, as well as the local capacity to control the disease. Malaria is also ...one of the few health outcomes that has been modeled by more than one research group and can therefore facilitate the first model intercomparison for health impacts under a future with climate change. We used bias-corrected temperature and rainfall simulations from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 climate models to compare the metrics of five statistical and dynamical malaria impact models for three future time periods (2030s, 2050s, and 2080s). We evaluated three malaria outcome metrics at global and regional levels: climate suitability, additional population at risk and additional person-months at risk across the model outputs. The malaria projections were based on five different global climate models, each run under four emission scenarios (Representative Concentration Pathways, RCPs) and a single population projection. We also investigated the modeling uncertainty associated with future projections of populations at risk for malaria owing to climate change. Our findings show an overall global net increase in climate suitability and a net increase in the population at risk, but with large uncertainties. The model outputs indicate a net increase in the annual person-months at risk when comparing from RCP2.6 to RCP8.5 from the 2050s to the 2080s. The malaria outcome metrics were highly sensitive to the choice of malaria impact model, especially over the epidemic fringes of the malaria distribution.
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