The SAARC Member States have more than an estimated 2.0 million TB cases accounting for close to one-third of the total cases of TB in the world. India alone had almost one-fifth of the global disease burden due to TB. India, Pakistan and Bangladesh followed by Afghanistan are the major contributors... of disease burden of TB in the SAARC Region. They are countries that have a dubious distinction of being on the list of 22 TB High Disease Countries in the world.
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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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Analysis with WorldView-3 Data Acquired 07 March 2015
This map illustrates the IDP camp at the UNMISS Protection of Civilian (PoC) area adjacent to the UNMISS base in Bentiu, Rubkona County, Unity State, South Sudan. Using high-resolution optical satellite imagery collected by the WorldView-3 sat...ellite on 07 March 2015, UNOSAT identified a total of 9,713 structures. Approximately 9,515 of these were classified as tent shelters and 198 as administrative buildings. This is a preliminary analysis and has not yet been validated in the field. Please send ground feedback to UNITAR / UNOSAT.
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The scope includes the assessment of activities to improve the response to affected populations, stakeholders, partners and donors, building on lessons learnt so far in this outbreak.
A call for national and regional containment, recovery and prevention