Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Covid-19 is possibly spreading through wastewater

Early Warning of COVID-19 Possible by Testing Wastewater

By CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY MARCH 31, 2020

Researchers are working on a new test to detect the coronavirus that causes COVI-19 in the wastewater of communities infected with the virus.

Researchers at Cranfield University are working on a new test to detect SARS-CoV-2 in the wastewater of communities infected with the virus.

The wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) approach could provide an eﬀective and rapid way to predict the potential spread of novel coronavirus pneumonia (COVID-19) by picking up on biomarkers in feces and urine from disease carriers that enter the sewer system.

Rapid testing kits using paper-based devices could be used on-site at wastewater treatment plants to trace sources and determine whether there are potential COVID-19 carriers in local areas.

Dr. Zhugen Yang, Lecturer in Sensor Technology at Cranfield Water Science Institute, said: “In the case of asymptomatic infections in the community or when people are not sure whether they are infected or not, real-time community sewage detection through paper analytical devices could determine whether there are COVID-19 carriers in an area to enable rapid screening, quarantine, and prevention.

“If COVID-19 can be monitored in a community at an early stage through WBE, eﬀective intervention can be taken as early as possible to restrict the movements of that local population, working to minimize the pathogen spread and threat to public health.”

The paper device is folded and unfolded in steps to filter the nucleic acids of pathogens from wastewater samples, then a biochemical reaction with preloaded reagents detects whether the nucleic acid of SARS-CoV-2 infection is present. Results are visible to the naked eye: a green circle indicating positive and a blue circle negative. Credit: Cranfield University

Recent studies have shown that live SARS-CoV-2 can be isolated from the feces and urine of infected people and the virus can typically survive for up to several days in an appropriate environment after exiting the human body.

“We have already developed a paper device for testing genetic material in wastewater for proof-of-concept, and this provides clear potential to test for infection with adaption,” added Dr Yang. “This device is cheap (costing less than £1) and will be easy to use for non-experts after further improvement.

“We foresee that the device will be able to offer a complete and immediate picture of population health once this sensor can be deployed in the near future.”

WBE is already recognized as an eﬀective way to trace illicit drugs and obtain information on health, disease, and pathogens. Dr. Yang has developed a similar paper-based device to successfully conduct tests for rapid veterinary diagnosis in India and for malaria in blood among rural populations in Uganda.

Paper analytical devices are easy to stack, store and transport because they are thin and lightweight, and can also be incinerated after use, reducing the risk of further contamination.

An overview of the approach – Can a Paper-Based Device Trace COVID-19 Sources with Wastewater-Based Epidemiology? – co-authored with Hua Zhang and Kang Mao of the Institute of Geochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guiyang, China, has recently been published in the Environmental Science & Technology journal.

Further development of the test is being sponsored by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and Royal Academy of Engineering.

Reference: “Can a Paper-Based Device Trace COVID-19 Sources with Wastewater-Based Epidemiology?” by Kang Mao, Hua Zhang and Zhugen Yang, 23 march 2020, Environmental Science & Technology journal.
DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.0c01174

Original : https://scitechdaily.com/early-warning-of-covid-19-possible-by-testing-wastewater/

Wednesday, March 25, 2020

The Game that inspired Covid-19? of 2020

PLAGUE INC.

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Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Relax Music for sleep - calm piano

AIDS Warrior to fight Covid-19 Battle

Global AIDS Warrior on the Frontlines of the Coronavirus Battle

Dr. Deborah Birx, a fixture at White House briefings, is known for working across agency lines

Dr. Deborah Birx answers a question during the daily briefing at the White House.
PHOTO: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Brett Forrest

March 24, 2020 8:15 am ET

Deborah Birx was leading an AIDS conference in Johannesburg on Feb. 27 when she received a call from the State Department summoning her to Washington to help combat a new disease that was about to change the way that all Americans lived.

In less than a month, Dr. Birx has become a central player in the Trump administration’s fight against the pandemic and a mainstay in the coronavirus task force’s public White House briefings, urging the public to recognize the severity of the threat.

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“Can we communicate effectively enough so that the American people take these guidelines seriously?” Dr. Birx asked in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. “Because that’s the only thing that’s going to change the course of this pandemic.”

As the U.S. coronavirus response coordinator, Dr. Birx has been a regular presence at the White House, invariably wearing colorful scarfs that she said she has collected along her international travels and that are representative of “the global community response that’s needed now.”

A global-health expert on immunology and vaccine research, Dr. Birx has spent decades combating the spread of HIV/AIDS. Since 2014, she has served as ambassador-at-large in the State Department as the U.S. global AIDS coordinator, managing an effort across multiple government departments.

“It’s why they sought her out for this particular role,” said Brian Honermann, the deputy director of public policy for Amfar, an AIDS research foundation, who has worked closely with Dr. Birx. “The ability to coordinate across different agencies.”

Dr. Birx, 63 years old, grew up in Philadelphia and earned a medical degree at Pennsylvania State University. Her father was an electrical engineer, her mother a nursing professor—an apt background for a daughter who would ultimately apply mathematical models to public-health problems, using numbers to combat illness.

Dr. Birx served 20 years as an Army doctor, attaining a colonel’s rank while working on immunology and vaccine research at the Pentagon and the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Birx led the military’s HIV research program at Walter Reed Army Medical Center before leaving the service in 2005 to join the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Dr. Birx says that if the public follows government guidelines seriously, it will alter the course of the pandemic. How serious will coronavirus be in the future? Join the conversation below.

The George W. Bush administration had recently established the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or Pepfar, to coordinate the aid and assistance that the U.S. government disbursed internationally to combat and contain the disease.

As the director of HIV/AIDS initiatives at CDC, Dr. Birx administered roughly half of Pepfar’s program, and in the process built a far-reaching network of global public health officials.

“She’s a very good manager,” said Tom Frieden, who was CDC director from 2009 to 2017. “She’s politically very savvy. She works hard. And she’s very focused on achieving results.”

In 2014, Dr. Birx effectively received a promotion when then-President Obama appointed her to lead Pepfar as the fourth U.S. global AIDS coordinator. Still serving in that position, she oversees a budget of $4 billion.

“She drives a hard program,” Mr. Honermann said. “She expects outcomes. She has a vision of what needs to happen.”

How Coronavirus Shut Down America

In her role at Pepfar, Dr. Birx has used mathematical modeling to examine and predict epidemiologic curves. And she has used this and other scientific data to assist the administration in making informed AIDS-related policy decisions, according to a senior coronavirus task force official.

Dr. Birx is one of the few remaining Obama appointees in the Trump administration.

When the coronavirus appeared in China last year, Dr. Birx was particularly concerned about its possible spread, according to the task force official. She had worked in that country during the SARS epidemic of 2002-2003 and had witnessed the troubles it had wrought.

She also realized that the subsequent increase in international travel among upwardly mobile Chinese might exacerbate the scattering of this new virus, the official said.

How the New Coronavirus Became a Global Pandemic — On Dec. 1, 2019, a patient in Wuhan, China, started showing symptoms of what doctors determined was a new coronavirus. Since then, the virus has spread to infect more than 100,000 people. Here’s how the virus grew to a global pandemic. Photo: Getty Images

After the virus jumped China’s borders, Dr. Birx was in touch with officials on the newly formed White House coronavirus task force, including CDC Director Robert Redfield and Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci have known each other since the early 1980s, when she served under him as a clinical immunology fellow.

The task force, then led by Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, was charged with developing the administration’s program to mitigate the spread of the virus. Dr. Birx began feeding general epidemics and modeling data to her colleagues to assist the effort, the task force official said.

As the epidemic began to take root in the U.S., President Trump installed Vice President Mike Pence to lead the task force, increasing the group’s significance and visibility. Dr. Birx was quickly on a plane from Africa.

Mr. Pence has referred to Dr. Birx as his "right arm in this effort.” In a March 4 meeting with airline executives, she was seated at Mr. Trump’s left elbow and has remained prominent.

Dr. Birx headed to the West Wing on Friday.
PHOTO: ALEX BRANDON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Dr. Birx works in an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next door to the White House, where she often attends meetings. She said she is compiling data and information from “20 to 30 different sources,” while staying in close touch with her many international public-health colleagues to monitor developments abroad.

A task force spokesman said that Dr. Birx pulls “dozens of work streams into focus.”

As the administration has at times struggled to maintain a consistent message, Dr. Birx also has occasionally been caught in the middle.

During a White House briefing on March 13, she held up a flow chart illustrating a Google project that Mr. Trump said was imminent and would provide Americans with an evaluation of coronavirus symptoms and testing recommendations. However, the announcement was premature, given the project isn’t yet complete.

The White House had previewed the announcement with Google to ensure accuracy, a person familiar with the matter said. Google representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The task force includes experts in the control of respiratory viruses—Covid-19 is one such virus—leading some to question why an expert in AIDS fills the role of coronavirus response coordinator.

Dr. Fauci, in a statement, cited Dr. Birx’s leadership of “complicated programs” targeting infectious diseases. “This skill and experience amply qualifies to coordinate the coronavirus effort,” he said.

WSJ NEWSLETTER

Original article: Here

Monday, March 23, 2020

COVID-19, AIDS and 9/11 - no compare

Stop comparing the coronavirus to AIDS and 9/11 — but recall their humanity

By Hannah Frishberg

March 23, 2020 | 3:15pm

A composite photo of the coronavirus pandemic, 9/11 terrorist attacks and the early AIDS crisis.

NY Post photo composite

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As the coronavirus pandemic continues to send the global economy and daily life into turmoil, it’s understandable that we’re all grasping for a comparison to make sense of the devastation.

Unfortunately, the comparisons that keep coming up online are to Sept. 11, 2001 and the early days of the AIDS epidemic. Those closest to the tragedies of the past say it’s a mistake to equate them to our current reality.

“People ask me if our lives today feel like the early years of HIV/AIDS, and I want to scream,” writes Mark S. King, an activist and blogger who tested positive for HIV in 1985. “There is no comparison. Just stop.”

“This isn’t like 9/11. This is like World War II. It is going to change the way we live as Americans,” MSNBC host Joe Scarborough said Tuesday of the current pandemic.

It’s lazy logic that equates those historic crises with the global influence of COVID-19. The three are impossibly different, apart from size of impact and climactic markers for the end of an era.

But survivors say there are unifying lessons to be learned from the lack of similarities. In fact, it’s the differences that can speak to what we should be grateful for, and where we can find shared strength in the current climate of fear and unknowns.

MOVIES DAY!

There was no day of horror

“I hear people saying, ‘Oh it’s another 9/11,’ ” Ken Tirado, a New York native, tells The Post. “Because 9/11, especially for New Yorkers, is very personal, and to just suddenly throw it out there, ‘Oh, it’s another day of infamy,’ to make it a cliche — it’s offensive to both cases.”

The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Tirado concedes, were also a national crisis with 2,983 lives lost and major economic and societal impacts — including prolonged closure of the New York Stock Exchange and the invention of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) — but the parallels end there.

“9/11 was very quick for a lot of people, it was one day of horror and then a couple of months reading about the pit and the funerals and the recovery,” says the 62-year-old who runs Staten Island’s Killmeyer’s Old Bavaria Inn. “But most people were only impacted by that one day. This is more of an unknown, lingering thing — we don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. It’s apples and oranges to me.”

Another difference? The anger. During 9/11, many in mourning directed their rage toward the individuals responsible for the attacks. Today, there’s no easy target for those emotions — just a faceless virus that could infect anyone at any time.

Many point optimistically to the way New Yorkers treated one another after the Twin Towers fell. In the face of coronavirus-fueled hate crimes, the hope now is that people will begin to replicate that post-9/11 behavior, in the context of a pandemic where social distancing is necessary — but compassion is still possible. There is a key difference, however, between the response then and what must happen now, says freelance fabricator Dan Glass, 52, who has lived on the Lower East Side since 1991.

“I was on my roof in the East Village on 9/11 and saw the towers fall,” he says. After 9/11, “the inclination was to go help, and gather together with those who needed it,” he says. With the coronavirus, on the other hand, gathering together will only make the situation worse and staying inside is one of the few ways individuals can fight the spread.

“Meeting together, that’s how you support each other — but we have to avoid each other,” Glass says. “It goes against our deepest responses: You want to go help someone, but by helping, you have to stay away.”

It is impossible, with the current physical restrictions, to feel the same sense of togetherness: “Isolation is fundamentally at odds with the notion of community,” Glass says.

The danger is everywhere

For lifelong New Yorker and city historian Joseph Anastasio, 45, the hoarding is the biggest contrast between New Yorkers’ current behavior and how they’ve behaved during past disasters, like 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy.

“In those situations, the need was localized. With the virus, it’s everywhere,” he says. “We all feel in danger, so we’re just hoarding across the board now,” he says, referring to the panic-buying at stores across the country.

He recalls how, in the days after 9/11, Pier 40 became a dedicated supplies drop-off location to store the massive amount of goods — gloves, masks, bottled water — that locals donated to first responders.

While the likeness between the current pandemic and 9/11 is slim, the tension around New York City does remind Anastasio of one particularly dark period in NYC history.

“I have not seen New Yorkers this tense since 1991, when it was the height of the crack wars and the murder rate was super high and there were muggers all over the place, and it was dangerous to be on the subway at night,” he says. “Everyone’s on that same hair trigger tensity, like if you tap them on the shoulder they’re going to explode.”

No need to fight for legitimacy

Another popular online comparison point for the coronavirus has become the early days of AIDS — but survivors say the two couldn’t be more different, as far as pandemics go.

For one, this is far less visible than AIDS, says Edward Rubin, a writer and curator who’s resided in the East Village since 1965.

“You would see people walking around with kaposi sarcoma — those little dots on your face. A lot of them looked like walking zombies, so you saw it,” he says.

In part because of the invisibility of the current crisis, it’s even more horrifying.

He adds that the pandemics further don’t compare because “this affects everyone, and AIDS did not affect everyone.”

He is trying to see a silver lining in the current crisis, though, hopeful that positive policy change, or some other benefit, may eventually come from the disease’s fallout.

Mark S. King, 59, has been shocked by how many people are attempting to draw parallels between the current pandemic and AIDS.

“To draw similarities … is simplistic, it’s revisionist,” he says. “ ’Oh, it’s a mysterious virus and we’re all very afraid,’ — the similarities end there,” King, who currently lives in Baltimore, tells The Post. “I have seen no one being socially outcast because they might have coronavirus,” nor needing to fight for legitimacy.

Early AIDS sufferers, on the other hand, “were in the wilderness. Tens of thousands of people died of AIDS in this country before our government lifted a finger. We had to fight for every scrap of funding and public attention.”

The universality of the coronavirus means it has gotten an immediate response.

“This is tangible to the mainstream in a way that AIDS wasn’t,” he says. “We had preachers on television telling us everyday that this was God’s punishment to us. Now, there is none of that. This new health crisis applies to everyone.

“At least there has been a response, however chaotic, to this. We did not have those advantages. That is why there is no comparison.”

Movies times

Surviving panic’s chokehold

There is one similarity he acknowledges, and that is widespread panic.

“What is the same is the sense of the unknown, and that brings fear. Are we at the beginning of this? Are we at the halfway mark? No one knows,” King says, but we do know that panic brings out the worst in people. “I think right now people are scrambling out of fear, and there hasn’t been much opportunity yet to display compassion and humanity. Everyone is trying to look out for themselves,” he says.

But he has faith we will rise together to get through this. “As someone who has lived through something that I would consider far worse, what heartens me is the strength of the human spirit and the fact that, even in those dark days [of AIDS], we did help one another, we did have courage. In what was a very scary time, we showed our best selves.”

Original article HERE

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