Tag: seasonal

Many of New Zealand’s Glaciers Could Disappear In a Decade Scientists Warn

New Zealand’s glaciers are becoming “smaller and more skeletal” due to the effects of climate change and scientists predict many could disappear within a decade.

An annual end-of-summer survey that records the snowline of more than 50 South Island glaciers has revealed continued loss of snow and ice.

Every year, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa), the Victoria University of Wellington and the conservation department gather thousands of aerial photographs of the glaciers to measure the altitude of the snowline and see how much of the previous winter’s snow has remained covering each glacier.

That snowline, also known as the equilibrium line altitude (ELA), allows scientists to evaluate the glacier’s health. If the glacier size has decreased, then the line will be higher, because less winter snow remains.

“We were expecting the snowlines to be high because of the warm weather we’ve had and sadly, our instincts were confirmed,” said Dr Andrew Lorrey, a principal scientist at Niwa.

New Zealand’s glaciers had lost mass most years over the past decade, said Dr Lauren Vargo from Victoria University. “But what was more striking to me is how much smaller and more skeletal so many of the glaciers are becoming.”

The country is experiencing more frequent temperature extremes, four to five times more extreme than would be expected in a climate with no long-term warming, Niwa reported in January, while 2021 was New Zealand’s hottest year on record.

Last week, Antarctica recorded temperatures more than 40C warmer than seasonal norms. Gregor Macara, a Niwa climate scientist, said this year’s survey showed a noticeable difference from the previous years.

“The snowline elevations this year were high, meaning much of the winter snows had melted, leaving a lot of glacial ice exposed. It appears to be yet another poor year for our ice, continuing the trend from recent years, and it is disheartening to see the ongoing decline.”

The long-term aerial survey began in 1977, giving a visual timeline of how much glaciers have retreated. Since the survey began, the global climate has warmed by about 1.1C and Niwa estimates that more than a third of the ice volume has been lost from the Southern Alps.

“What we’re seeing is a clear retreat, which is no doubt thanks to climate change. In a decade, we predict that many of our beloved and important glaciers will be gone,” Lorrey said.

The ramifications are significant. Glaciers are an important store of fresh water, their seasonal melt into rivers supporting irrigation of farmland and hydropower schemes, and acting as a buffer against drought. The disappearing ice also contributes to rising sea levels.

“This will have far reaching impacts, such as altering our beautiful landscape, affecting the livelihoods of people who rely on these natural wonders for tourism, and flow on effects from decreased meltwater during periods of drought,” Lorrey said.

“It also emphasises the urgency of slowing climate change because the impacts are going to become increasingly costly and hard to avoid.”

By: in Wellington

Source: Many of New Zealand’s glaciers could disappear in a decade, scientists warn | Glaciers | The Guardian

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Moderna Data Shows mRNA Isn’t a Quick Fix For The Flu Vaccine

The first data from clinical trials of Moderna’s mRNA-based seasonal flu vaccine, released by the company Friday morning, were underwhelming — a finding that shows gene-based vaccines might not be a fix for all the problems with vaccine development.

The overwhelming success of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, made by Moderna and Pfizer / BioNTech, supercharged interest in that strategy for developing shots. The shots inject people with tiny snippets of the gene for a virus, which the body builds and then uses to learn how to fight the virus.

Current flu shots contain inactivated copies of the influenza virus. mRNA vaccines are faster to design and produce because manufacturers don’t have to grow copies of the virus, which is why experts have for years seen them as the future of vaccines.

Moderna launched a clinical trial of an mRNA seasonal flu vaccine this summer, hoping to capture the same success as it did with its COVID-19 vaccine. Typically, seasonal flu shots are around 40 to 60 percent effective, and pharmaceutical companies want to make that better. Three other companies are also working on mRNA flu shots.

Moderna released its first results during an investor phone call and presented slides showing that the mRNA flu shots did generate antibodies — but the levels of those antibodies weren’t higher than those for other flu shots already on the market. They also had more side effects than existing shots.

The findings don’t necessarily mean that mRNA flu shots aren’t any better than what we have now. Because mRNA vaccines are faster to design and make, the shots don’t have to be developed as far in advance. Companies may not have to do as much guesswork around what strain of the flu to target them against each year because they can wait to make the shots until they see what strains are circulating.

And as far as efficacy goes, there’s still a lot more data to collect: Moderna is preparing to conduct larger trials that would test how well the shots actually keep people from getting sick in the real world (not just testing antibody levels)..

Still, this early data shows that the immune system is tricky and that mRNA vaccines probably aren’t an easy shortcut for stopping a virus as persistent as the flu. More studies will be needed to figure out if there is a specific benefit to using mRNA vaccines to fight the flu, wrote chemist and writer Derek Lowe in Science. But it’s not a sure thing.

Nicole Wetsman

By Nicole Wetsman

Source: Moderna data shows mRNA isn’t a quick fix for the flu vaccine – The Verge

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Will Covid Return When It Gets Colder?

In this week’s edition of the Covid Q&A, we look at what the cold weather might bring for the virus. In hopes of making this very confusing time just a little less so, each week Bloomberg Prognosis is picking one question sent in by readers and putting it to experts in the field. This week’s question comes to us from Rebecca in Albany, New York. She asks:

What will happen to infection rates in the U.S. when cold weather returns next fall?

While many parts of the world are still battling outbreaks of Covid-19, this summer in the U.S. it’s started to feel like the pandemic is over. Many states have completely done away with restrictions, and national case numbers are at their lowest levels since the pandemic began. But new, more contagious variants of the virus are on the rise, and there are regional pockets of vaccine holdouts that threaten to keep Covid in circulation.

All this suggests, unfortunately, is that it’s likely the U.S. isn’t done with the coronavirus just yet. “While it’s not purely a function of cooler temperature, Covid will rise again in the fall (if it doesn’t before),” says Andrew Noymer, a professor of public health at University of California, Irvine. “Covid’s future is as a seasonal disease in the fashion of influenza — and Covid’s future is now. Covid will be back in the fall or winter, or both.”

Without U.S. inoculation rates far higher than their current level, Noymer says, vaccines are unlikely to stop a cold-weather surge. “The vaccines will make the coming wave less severe than the one that crested in January 2021, but vaccination rates are currently not high enough to prevent another wave,” he says.

A resurgence was always likely, he says, but more contagious strains like the delta variant first identified in India may make the wave come sooner.  “Every major viral respiratory disease is seasonal with a winter dominance,” he says. “Influenza doesn’t vanish, and neither will Covid.”

Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington, said that projections by the school’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation show a slow rise in cases in early September that will pick up with winter and peak in late January or early February. How bad it gets, he says, will depend on vaccination coverage, the variants in circulation and whether people return to habits like mask-wearing.

Still, several Covid vaccines appear to be far more efficacious than those for the seasonal flu. That means that while we may see a resurgence of the coronavirus, the worst is still most likely behind us.

Track the virus

One in Five Young Adults Not Working, Studying 

Almost one in five young adults in the U.S. was neither working nor studying in the first quarter as Black and Hispanic youth remain idle at disproportionate rates. The increase last quarter appears to be driven largely by joblessness, while school attendance rose moderately as campuses started to reopen, according to the study. Young adults are still experiencing double-digit unemployment rates.

Inactive youth is a worrying sign for the future of the economy, as they don’t gain critical job skills to help realize their future earnings potential.

People will be interacting more often indoors in places with poor ventilation, which will increase the risk of transmission, says Mauricio Santillana, a mathematician at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, who models disease spread.

But even if there is a small seasonal effect, the main driver of increased spread will be the vast number of people who are still susceptible to infection, says Rachel Baker, an epidemiologist at Princeton University in New Jersey. That means people in places that are going into summer shouldn’t be complacent either, say researchers.

“By far the biggest factor that will affect the size of an outbreak will be control measures such as social distancing and mask wearing,” says Baker.

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Evidence so far

Seasonal trends in viral infection are driven by multiple factors, including people’s behaviour and the properties of the virus — some don’t like hot, humid conditions.

Laboratory experiments reveal that SARS-CoV-2 favours cold, dry conditions, particularly out of direct sunlight. For instance, artificial ultraviolet radiation can inactivate SARS-CoV-2 particles on surfaces1 and in aerosols2, especially in temperatures of around 40 °C. Infectious virus also degrades faster on surfaces in warmer and more humid environments3. In winter, people tend to heat their houses to around 20 °C, and the air is dry and not well ventilated, says Dylan Morris, a mathematical biologist at Princeton. “Indoor conditions in the winter are pretty favourable to viral stability.”

To assess whether infections with a particular virus rise and fall with the seasons, researchers typically study its spread in a specific location, multiple times a year, over many years. But without the benefit of time, they have tried to study the seasonal contribution to SARS-CoV-2 transmission by looking at infection rates in various places worldwide.

A study4 published on 13 October looked at the growth in SARS-CoV-2 infections in the first four months of the pandemic, before most countries introduced controls. It found that infections rose fastest in places with less UV light, and predicted that, without any interventions, cases would dip in summer and peak in winter. In winter, “the risk goes up, but you can still dramatically reduce your risk by good personal behaviour”, says Cory Merow, an ecologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, and a co-author of the study. “The weather is a small drop in the pan.”

But Francois Cohen, an environmental economist at the University of Barcelona in Spain, says that testing was also quite limited early in the pandemic, and continues to be unreliable, so it is impossible to determine the effect of weather on the spread of the virus so far.

Baker has tried to tease apart the effect of climate on the seasonal pattern of cases during the course of a pandemic, using data about the humidity sensitivity of another coronavirus. She and her colleagues modelled5 the rise and fall in infection rates over several years for New York City with and without a climate effect, and with different levels of control measures.

They found that a small climate effect can result in substantial outbreaks when the seasons change if control measures are only just managing to contain the virus. “That could be a location where climate might nudge you over,” Baker says. The team posted its results on the preprint server medRxiv on 10 September; the authors suggest that stricter control measures might be needed during winter to reduce the risk of outbreaks.

In the future

If SARS-CoV-2 can survive better in cold conditions, it’s still difficult to disentangle that contribution from the effect of people’s behaviour, says Kathleen O’Reilly, a mathematical epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. “Flu has been around for hundreds of years and the specific mechanism as to why you have peaks of flu in the winter is still poorly understood,” says O’Reilly.

And even if researchers had more reliable data for SARS-CoV-2, they would see only small or negligible seasonal effects so early in the pandemic, when much of the population is still susceptible, says Relman.

Over time, however, seasonal effects could play a more important part in driving infection trends, as more people build up immunity to the virus. This could take up to five years through natural infection, or less if people are vaccinated, says Baker.

But whether a seasonal pattern emerges at all, and what it will look like, will depend on many factors that are yet to be understood, including how long immunity lasts, how long recovery takes and how likely it is that people can be reinfected, says Colin Carlson, a biologist who studies emerging diseases at Georgetown University in Washington DC.

What you should read

Source: Will Covid Return When It Gets Colder? – Bloomberg

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The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in misinformation and conspiracy theories about the scale of the pandemic and the origin, prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of the disease. False information, including intentional disinformation, has been spread through social media, text messaging,and mass media. Journalists have been arrested for allegedly spreading fake news about the pandemic. False information has also been propagated by celebrities, politicians, and other prominent public figures. The spread of COVID-19 misinformation by governments has also been significant.

Commercial scams have claimed to offer at-home tests, supposed preventives, and “miracle” cures. Several religious groups have claimed their faith will protect them from the virus. Without evidence, some people have claimed the virus is a bioweapon accidentally or deliberately leaked from a laboratory, a population control scheme, the result of a spy operation, or the side effect of 5G upgrades to cellular networks.

The World Health Organization (WHO) declared an “infodemic” of incorrect information about the virus that poses risks to global health.While belief in conspiracy theories is not a new phenomenon, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, this can lead to adverse health effects. Cognitive biases, such as jumping to conclusions and confirmation bias, may be linked to the occurrence of conspiracy beliefs.

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