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The other casualties of the ME war
As Israel continued the bombing campaign that has turned parts of Lebanon into rubble, environmentalists were warning of widespread and lasting damage. Spilled and burning oil, along with forest fires, toxic waste flows and growing garbage heaps have gone from nuisances to threats to people and wildlife, they say, marring a country traditionally known for its clean air and scenic greenery.
Many of Lebanon’s once pristine beaches and much of its coastline have been coated with a thick sludge that threatens marine life. As smoke billowed overhead late last week, turning day into dusk, Ali Saeed, a resident of Jiyeh, recounted how war has changed his small industrial town about 15 miles south of Beirut.
Most people have left, he said. It is virtually impossible to drive on the roads, and almost everyone hides behind sealed windows. “There’s nowhere to run,” Mr Saeed said, showing off the black speckles on his skin that have turned everything white here into grey. “It’s dripping fuel from the sky.”
A large oil spill and fire caused by Israeli bombing have sent an oil slick travelling up the coast of Lebanon to Syria, threatening to become the worst environmental disaster in the country’s history and engulfing the town of Jiyeh in smoke.
“The escalating Israeli attacks on Lebanon did not only kill its civilians and destroy its infrastructure, but they are also annihilating its environment,” warned Green Line, a Lebanese environmental group, in a statement. “This is one of the worst environmental crises in Lebanese history.”
The most significant damage has come from airstrikes on an oil storage depot at the edge of Jiyeh on July 13 and 15. Oil spewed into the Mediterranean Sea and a fire erupted that has been burning ever since.
Four of the plant’s six oil storage containers have burned completely, spilling at least 10,000 tons of thick fuel oil into the sea initially, and possibly up to 15,000 more in the weeks since. A fifth tank burst into flames, residents said, adding to a smoke cloud that has spewed soot and debris miles away. The fire is so hot that it has melted rail cars into blobs and turned the sand below into glass.
Engineers are concerned that a sixth tank still untouched by the fire could soon explode, making the situation even graver. The prevailing winds and currents have swept the oil northwards up the coast of Lebanon, and late last week it reached the coast of Syria, officials said. — Dawn/The New York Times News Service
Scientists have found how the body harnesses the power of electricity to heal cuts and grazes — an effect they manipulated to speed up wound healing dramatically. In what amounts to the modern rediscovery of an old medical curiosity, the finding raises hopes for revolutionary treatments to patch up injured patients in hours instead of days.
In preliminary lab tests, researchers showed that by controlling the weak electrical fields that arise naturally at wound sites, they could direct cells to either close or open up a wound at the flick of a switch. By making the cells move faster, they were able to speed up wound healing by 50 per cent.
The role of electricity in wound healing has received scant attention from the scientific community since the German physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond cut his arm and measured the electrical field across the wound in the mid-1800s. But in the journal Nature, an international team of scientists led by Aberdeen University not only confirms the effect but also unravels the genetic machinery behind it.
Using sheets of skin in dishes, Min Zhao and Colin McCaig show that electricity flows from the edges of a wound as soon as an incision is made. The current is triggered by positively charged sodium ions coursing through the tissue in one direction and an opposing rush of negatively charged chloride ions, together creating a voltage across the wound about 15 times weaker than an AA battery.
“These natural signals are instantaneous. The moment you make a wound, there’s an electrical signal at the wound edge and it lasts as long as it takes the wound to heal up,” said Prof McCaig. Further tests showed epithelial cells, the building blocks of skin tissue, sensed and followed electric fields towards the wound site using two molecular structures, or receptors.
One mobilises cells to creep in the direction of the electric field, while the other shuts down any signals that threaten to send the cell off course.
The rules governing initial drug safety trials on human guinea pigs should be changed, according to a committee set up in the aftermath of the drug trial at Northwick Park Hospital, London, which left six men seriously ill.
The Expert Scientific Group was asked by the British health secretary, Patricia Hewitt, to review what lessons could be learned from the trial. Three recommendations put forward by the authors are that doctors should consider using ill patients as test subjects rather than healthy volunteers; subjects should be given the experimental drug sequentially, rather than all at once; and doctors should be more conservative about the dose given to the first human subjects.
“The first human exposure to a new medicine will always carry some risk, even if extremely small,” the report’s authors write. “Our aim has been to optimise the safety of future first-in-man trials without stifling innovation or raising unnecessary barriers to the development of useful new medicines.”
The interim report is open for consultation until Sept 14.
The United States is risking a “brain drain”, in which its scientists will flock across the Atlantic, after the EU reached a “historic” deal on human embryonic stem cells.
A week after George Bush limited federal funds for the highly sensitive area, the EU warned Washington that “disillusioned” US scientists will want to make the most of Europe’s more liberal rules. Lord Sainsbury, Britain’s science minister, said: “There are a group of American scientists who are very disillusioned.
“In this field we have seen US scientists coming to the UK. If the US continues to take this very negative position I think within this field of regenerative medicine we will see scientists come from America and from other parts of the world, who would have gone to America, to the UK instead.” — Dawn/The Guardian News Service
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