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WHO Declares TB an Emergency in Africa

The World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Committee for Africa comprising health ministers from 46 Member States has declared tuberculosis an emergency in the African region - a response to an epidemic that has more than quadrupled the annual number of new TB cases in most African countries since 1990 and is continuing to rise across the continent, killing more than half a million people every year.

The declaration was made in a resolution adopted at the end of the committee's fifty-fifth session in Maputo, Mozambique. The resolution urges Member States in the African Region to commit more human and financial resources to strengthen DOTS programs and scale up collaborative interventions to fight the co-epidemic of TB and HIV. These and other measures recommended by the committee encompass those laid out in a "blueprint" developed by the global Stop TB Partnership, which calls for US$2.2 billion in new funding for TB control in Africa during 2006-2007.

Globally, TB is second only to HIV/AIDS as a cause of illness and death of adults, accounting for nearly nine million cases of active disease and two million deaths every year. Although it has only 11% of the world's population, Africa accounts today for more than a quarter of this global burden with an estimated 2.4 million TB cases and 540,000 TB deaths annually.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, African countries like Tanzania, Mozambique and Malawi were among the first to apply what became the global TB control strategy now known as DOTS. But in the past 15 years, TB incidence rates have soared in the region - to as high as four-fold in Malawi and five-fold in Kenya, to cite some typical examples -due largely to the link with HIV/AIDS, poverty and weak health systems. Although countries have made efforts to treat the rising tide of TB cases, they are still being outpaced by the epidemic.

Among the constraints to fighting the epidemic cited in the Maputo meeting is the inadequate financial support currently available for TB control. A large majority of African countries that provided financial data to WHO in 2003 reported funding gaps, including eight of the nine countries with the highest TB burden. Many national TB programs are relying extensively on grants from external donor agencies, including the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria (GFATM). At the same time, few African countries have included TB in their poverty alleviation strategies.

But more financial resources alone will not solve the TB problem. Dedicated efforts must also be made to strengthen health systems and respond to the crisis of health workforce attrition in the region. The specific actions called for by the Regional Committee to address the TB emergency are:

• improve the quantity and quality of staff involved in TB control;
• rapidly improve TB case detection and treatment success rates with expanded DOTS coverage at national and district levels;
• reduce the combined TB patient default and transfer out rates to 10% or less;
• scale up interventions to manage TB and HIV together, including increased access to anti-retroviral therapy for TB patients who are co-infected with HIV, and to chemoprophylaxis against TB for people with HIV;
• expand national TB partnerships, public-private collaboration and community participation in TB control activities.

In the other four WHO regions of the world, TB trends are either stable or in decline and are on track to reach the MDG targets of halving TB prevalence and deaths by 2015.

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Earth's Core Rotates Faster Than Its Crust, Scientists Say

Scientists have ended a long debate by proving that Earth's core rotates faster than its surface.

Their research measured differences in the time it took seismic waves generated by nearly identical earthquakes to travel through Earth's inner core.

According to geologists Jian Zhang of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO), Xiaodong Song of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and other co-authors of a paper in the Aug. 26 issue of the journal Science , Earth's iron core is rotating approximately 1 degree per year faster than the rest of the planet.

The scientists studied waveform doublets--earthquakes that are detected at the same seismic recording station in two different places, at two different times. A Sept. 2003, earthquake in the Atlantic Ocean near the South Sandwich Islands that was also detected in Ala., provided a near-exact match with one that had occurred in Dec.1993.

The seismograms were almost identical for shocks that had traveled only in the mantle and outer core. But seismic waves that had traveled through the inner core looked slightly different: they had made the trip through the Earth faster in 2003 than in 1993. The plausible explanation – the faster rotation of the inner core.

In all, the geologists analyzed 18 "doublets" from the South Sandwich Islands that were detected at Ala. seismic stations between 1961 and 2004.

The work was also funded by the Natural Science Foundation of China.

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NASA/NOAA Announce Major Weather Forecasting Advancement

NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) outlined research that has helped to improve the accuracy of medium-range weather forecasts in the Northern Hemisphere.

NASA and NOAA scientists at the Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation (JCSDA) in Camp Springs, Md., came up with procedures to improve forecasting accuracy. The scientists worked with experimental data from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite.

They found incorporating AIRS data into numerical weather prediction models improves the accuracy range of experimental six-day Northern Hemisphere weather forecasts by up to six hours, a four percent increase. AIRS is a high-spectral resolution infrared instrument that takes 3-D pictures of atmospheric temperatures, water vapor and trace gases.

The instrument data have officially been incorporated into NOAA's National Weather Service's operational weather forecasts.

The European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasts began incorporating data from AIRS into their operational forecasts in October 2003. The center reported an improvement in forecast accuracy of eight hours in Southern Hemisphere five-day forecasts.

AIRS is the result of more than 30 years of atmospheric research. It is led by Dr. Moustafa Chahine of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. AIRS is the first in a series of advanced infrared sounders that will provide accurate, detailed atmospheric temperature and moisture observations for weather and climate applications.

The JCSDA is operated by NOAA, NASA, the U.S. Air Force and Navy. The goals of the center are to accelerate the use of observations from Earth-orbiting satellites to improve weather and climate forecasts, and to increase the accuracy of climate data sets.

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IOM Names 2005-2006 Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Fellows

The Institute of Medicine (IOM) of the National Academies has named seven new Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellows for 2005–2006.

The fellows -- outstanding midcareer health professionals -- were chosen on a competitive basis from nominations submitted by academic institutions, nonprofit health care organizations, and other community-based providers.

The fellows will spend a year in Washington, D.C., working in a congressional office or the executive branch. During this year, they will enrich their understanding of public policy practices and the ways government health research relates to the mission of their home institutions and local communities. At the completion of their fellowship, the fellows will return to their communities to apply their experiences to improving health policy and management. Fellows receive additional funds for up to two years so that they may continue their development as health policy leaders.

The fellowship program was established in 1973 at the Institute of Medicine with a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Princeton, N.J. The fellows were selected by the IOM's Health Policy Fellowships Advisory Board, chaired by Robert Graham, M.D., professor of family medicine, University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.

The 2005-2006 fellows are:

Martina Bebin, M.D., M.P.A.; associate professor of pediatrics and neurology, University of Alabama at Birmingham and Children's Hospital of Alabama, Huntsville

Leona Cuttler, M.D.; professor of pediatrics, Case Western Reserve University; division chief, pediatric endocrinology, diabetes and metabolism; and medical director, Center for Chronic Conditions of Childhood, Rainbow Babies and Children's Hospital, Cleveland

Sarah England, Ph.D.; associate professor of physiology and biophysics, Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine, University of Iowa, Iowa City

Kathy Hebert, M.D.; clinical associate professor of medicine, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, and director of cardiology, Chabert Medical Center, Houma

Robin Hemphill, M.D., M.P.H.; associate program director of emergency medicine, and medical director, National Center for Emergency Preparedness, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville

Roger Johns, M.D., M.H.S.; professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore

Alfred Pheley, Ph.D.; professor and chair, department of community and rural medicine, and assistant dean for clinical research, Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine, Blacksburg

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History’s Greatest Comet Hunter Discovers 1000th Comet

The ESA/NASA SOHO spacecraft achieved an incredible milestone earlier this month - the discovery of its 1000th comet. The 1000th comet was a Kreutz-group comet spotted in images from the C3 coronagraph on SOHO's LASCO instrument by Toni Scarmato, from Calabria, Italy.

Just five minutes prior to discovering SOHO's 1000th comet, Toni had also spotted SOHO's 999th comet. These comets take Toni's personal number of SOHO discoveries to 15.

Many SOHO comet discoveries have been by amateurs using SOHO images on the internet, and SOHO comet hunters come from all over the world. Toni Scarmato is a high school teacher and astrophysics graduate of the University of Bologna.

The SOHO team also held a contest over the internet to guess the time when the 1000th comet would be discovered. The contest winner is Andrew Dolgopolov of Dublin, Ireland, who guessed the time of the comet’s closest approach to the Sun (perihelion time) within 22 minutes.  

SOHO , the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory , is a joint effort between NASA and ESA and is now in its tenth year of operation. Although it was originally planned as a solar and heliospheric mission, it was optimistically hoped that LASCO might observe at least a handful of ‘sungrazer’ comets, based on the success of the SOLWIND coronagraph in the late 1970s and 1980s, which discovered a small number of very bright Kreutz-group comets.

It was not long after SOHO began sending down a steady stream of data in 1996 that SOHO scientists spotted a Kreutz-group comet in LASCO images. Soon, several more comets had been found and word started to spread of SOHO’s potential as a comet discoverer.

In 2000, amateur astronomer Mike Oates started to search the SOHO images, which had recently became available via the internet. He soon revealed just how much potential SOHO had by quickly spotting over 100 comets in LASCO images.

Almost all SOHO's comets are discovered using images from its LASCO instrument, the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph. LASCO is used to observe the faint, multimillion-degree outer atmosphere of the Sun, called the corona. A disk in the instrument is used to make an artificial eclipse, blocking direct light from the Sun so the much fainter corona can be seen. Sungrazing comets are discovered when they enter LASCO's field of view as they pass close by the Sun.

As time passed, more professional astronomers, as well as amateur enthusiasts from all over the world, joined the search for SOHO comets. In August 2002, Rainer Kracht (now the leading SOHO comet discoverer, with over 150 SOHO comets) spotted SOHO’s 500th comet. This in itself was an achievement that none of the SOHO/LASCO scientists ever imagined would, or could, happen.

However, just three years later, SOHO, with 1000 comet discoveries, is responsible for almost half of all officially recorded comets in history.