You can help us compile future news posts by putting any GCR news you see in the comment thread of this blog post, or send it via email to Grant Wilson (grant [at] gcrinstitute.org).
So far 115 people have been diagnosed with a strain of bird flu known as H7N9 that was previously unknown in humans. Twenty-three of the people known to have contracted the disease have already died. The discovery of a 4-year-old boy who has the virus but who has no apparent symptoms raised concerns that the virus could be spread more widely. Researchers are also investigating at least several possible cases of human-to-human transmission. Taiwanese authorities report that a businessman who recently returned from Suzhou has become the first case diagnosed outside of mainland China. Epidemiologists worry that if the virus continues to spread at the same rate it could be a serious public health problem. Authorities in Shanghai destroyed more than 20,000 birds after the virus was discovered in birds at a live poultry market. There is currently no vaccine for H7N9, although it does appear to respond to antiviral medications. In Foreign Policy, Laurie Garrett argues that the outbreak of H7N9 in humans could be linked to the mysterious deaths of pigs, ducks, and swans in China. “If we were imagining how a pandemic would unfold,” Garrett writes, “this could certainly serve as an excellent script.”
A new paper in The Journal of Infectious Diseases suggests that a coronavirus known as hCoV-EMC has the potential to be deadlier than SARS. The virus has killed 11 of the 17 people who contracted it since it first appeared in Saudi Arabia last year, but doesn’t seem to be easily transmitted among people. Laboratory tests suggest that the virus might be treatable with a combination of antiviral drugs. In Nature, Simon Wain-Hobson called for researchers to continue their moratorium on “gain-of-function” research into what might make bird flu spread more easily among humans. The GAO reissued its call for a national strategy to oversee high biosafety level labs just weeks before the Galveston National Laboratory reported that it had lost a vial containing a sample of the Guanarito virus. The Guanarito virus causes Venezuelan hemorrhagic fever, which has a mortality rate as high as 20% but does not normally spread among humans. The lab says the sample was probably sterilized accidentally as a result of a clerical error.
North Korea announced it had ordered its missile units to be ready to strike South Korea and the US after American stealth bombers joined military exercises with South Korea. Although US officials said there was no evidence that North Korea was mobilizing its forces, the US responded by announcing it would deploy a missile defense system on Guam to strengthen its “defense posture against the North Korean regional ballistic missile threat.” Japan set up a Patriot antimissile battery in Tokyo and deployed warships equipped with Aegis radar systems to the Sea of Japan. A nuclear monitoring station in Japan also detected signs that North Korea may have conducted a nuclear weapons test in February. In Foreign Policy, Ken Lieber and Daryl Press argue that while North Korea is unlikely to launch a nuclear strike in the near future, North Korean brinksmanship increases the chances that tensions could escalate into a nuclear confrontation. In a controversial New York Times opinion piece, Jeremi Suri argued that the US should launch a preemptive strike to destroy North Korean missiles before they could be launched.
Iran restarted operations at two uranium mines, as well as at a plant that produces uranium yellowcake. Yellowcake can be processed to make fuel for nuclear reactors or material for nuclear bombs. Amos Yadlin, Israel’s former head of military intelligence, said that Iran could soon cross the “red line” that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu says should be drawn before Iran can make a nuclear a weapon. The US and Russia agreed to hold high-level missile defense talks after the US cancelled a plan to deploy long-range missile interceptors to Poland.
In the Michigan Journal of International Law, Eric Talbot Jensen argues that the body of international law that deals with armed conflict needs to be updated to deal with new weapons technologies. CNN reported on Shodan, a search engine that can find a wide range of devices—from webcams and security cameras all the way up to traffic control systems—that are connected to the internet. Many of these devices aren’t password-protected and can be accessed by anyone who finds them. San Francisco startup Cambrian Genomics said that it’s working on a DNA laser-printing technique that will make synthesizing DNA 10,000 times cheaper. Lowering the cost of synthesizing DNA would open up new areas of medicine and genetic engineering, but would also make it easier to create potentially dangerous genetically-engineered bacteria or viruses.
The Least Developed Countries Group, which represents 49 countries, announced in advance of the Bonn Climate Change Conference that they are prepared to commit to binding cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. In the US, the budget sequester’s automatic spending cuts have hit the budgets of environmental and energy agencies. And James Hansen, the climatologist who issued one of the most influential early warnings about the dangers of global warming, is retiring from NASA to devote his energy to fighting climate change.
An article in Scientific American looked at whether there are tipping points for global climate change. While it’s hard to find a discrete global system with a clear tipping point, it is nevertheless possible that the global climate might reach a point at which change accelerates and becomes difficult to stop. Tony Barnosky, a paleobiologist who argues that we might be nearing a planetary tipping point, makes an analogy to an egg rolling off a table: “You’re pushing an egg toward the end of the table. Not much happens. Then it goes off the edge and it breaks. That egg is now in a fundamentally different state, you can’t get it back to what it was.”
In a talk at TEDxOxford, Nick Bostrom argued that we should take the danger of human extinction more seriously. Bostrom argued that at the moment more research is done on snowboarding and dung beetles than on threats to the human survival. And in Sustainability, The Global Catastrophic Risk Institute’s Tim Maher and Seth Baum argue that we not only need more research into how we can prevent a catastrophe, but also into how we can survive a catastrophe.
This news summary was put together in collaboration with and is cross-posted at Anthropocene. Thanks to Seth Baum, Kaitlin Butler, and Grant Wilson for help compiling the news.
We plan to do this every month. Please post links to any news pieces you think we should include in the comment section below, or send it via email to Grant Wilson (grant [at] gcrinstitute.org).
For last month’s news summary, please see GCR News Summary March 2013.
