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Global update: Bird flu on Europe’s doorstep
The bird flu crisis moved a step closer to Britain’s shores as the country’s most senior medical adviser demanded that all doctors draw up emergency plans to distribute 14 million doses of drugs to combat the disease.
As the deadly virus entered Europe for the first time with confirmed cases in Romania, Sir Liam Donaldson said that all of Britain’s 34,000 GPs would be told to prepare for a massive influx of patients if a bird flu pandemic hit the country.
Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, who advises the government, will tell every practice in the country to gear up for the ‘inevitable’ event. He said that doctors will be needed to hand out more than 14 million doses of antiviral drugs and ensure home visits for patients to free hospital beds and minimize deaths.
“This is public health enemy number one,” Donaldson told The Observer. “It is at the top of our priority list and it is a when, not whether.” He said the world was now long overdue a flu pandemic and his team was working with the assumption that it would hit one in four Britons, killing 53,000 people. “That is the most likely scenario,” he said.
His order for GPs to get ready for more patients and a larger workload came on Thursday, when also revealed Britain’s updated emergency plans.
British scientists announced last week that three birds found dead in Romania had been infected by H5N1, the lethal strain of avian flu. It is the same strain that was found in 2,000 birds in Turkey.
Are we men or mice?
It may be small, furry and too fond by far of the contents of our cupboards, but the humble mouse has great things going for it. It now transpires that Mus musculus is remarkably similar to Homo sapiens. Indeed, each of us shares 99 per cent of our genes with it.
Not only are mouse genes like ours, so are the development of their embryos, their patterns of disease and even their behavioural problems. Mice get stressed, too.
These similarities are about to be exploited by the scientific community. Mice are to become researchers’ main vehicles for unravelling humanity’s genetic secrets.
In Venice recently, scientists launched a £100 million EU programme to breed millions of genetically engineered mice. The aim is to recreate all the main human ailments — diabetes, heart disease, cancer and mental illness — in the mouse. In doing so, the genetic and environmental roots of these conditions will be exposed and new paths to the creation of drugs and treatments revealed.
“The European Union has recognized the power of mouse genetics,” said the project’s co-ordinator, Professor Wolfgang Wurst, at the launch. — Dawn/The Guardian News Service (c) The observer
Battle for the internet
A battle has erupted over who governs the internet, with America demanding to maintain a key role in the network it helped create and other countries demanding more control. The European commission is warning that if a deal cannot be reached at a meeting in Tunisia next month the internet will split apart.
At issue is the role of the US government in overseeing the internet’s address structure, called the domain name system (DNS), which enables communication between the world’s computers. It is managed by the California-based, not-for-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) under contract to the US department of commerce.
A meeting of officials in Geneva last month was meant to formulate a way of sharing internet governance which politicians could unveil at the UN-sponsored World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis on November 16-18.
A European Union plan that goes a long way to meeting the demands of developing countries to make the governance more open collapsed in the face of US opposition. Viviane Reding, European IT commissioner, says that if a multilateral approach cannot be agreed, countries such as China, Russia, Brazil and some Arab states could start operating their own versions of the internet. — Dawn/The Guardian News Service
Vietnam also rises
Christopher Vaughan, vice president of product development for Reef Point Systems in Massachusetts, US, considered all the usual places, including India and Eastern Europe, as he sought low-cost programmers to help write computer code for his company’s advanced security systems for mobile networks. But ultimately Vaughan bet on Vietnam’s TMA Solutions, a private company.
“I get the most bang for my buck here,” Vaughan said on a recent trip to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly called Saigon. “I didn’t realize that they had progressed as far as they had. Vietnam just kind of popped out.”
Vietnam is still a newcomer to IT outsourcing. Although its fledgling software industry is starting to register on the radar screens of international high-tech companies, business has not grown nearly as fast as the country’s authorities, or local tech entrepreneurs, had hoped.
But Vietnam’s software industry is now working to overcome its handicaps, unleash its potential and establish itself on the global software outsourcing map.
The origins of noodles
Long and stringy, chewy or delicate, stuffed or hollow: In all its configurations, the humble noodle is a primary food source for billions of people, but its origins have been obscured.
The Italians claim they created the noodle as the perfect complement for tomato sauces; the Chinese say the Italians got it from them, via Marco Polo; Arabs claim its creation as an easily stored foodstuff suitable for long treks in the desert. The Japanese, Koreans, French and even the Germans have also claimed the noodle as their own.
Chinese researchers may have finally settled the contentious question after unearthing a 4,000-year-old container of noodles in northwestern China, according to a report in the latest issue of the journal Nature.
The easily recognizable noodles are far older than any that have previously been discovered and predate the first written mention of noodles by at least 2,000 years. — Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times
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