Earth's species feel the squeeze

By Jonathan Amos
BBC News science reporter
"Unprecedented" effort is required to slow biodiversity loss.
If we continue with current rates of species extinction, we will have no chance of rolling back poverty and the lives of all humans will be diminished.

That is the stark warning to come out of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA), the most comprehensive audit of the health of our planet to date.

Organisms are disappearing at something like 100 to 1,000 times the "background levels" seen in the fossil record.
Scientists warn that removing so many species puts our own existence at risk.

It will certainly make it much harder to lift the world's poor out of hardship given that these people are often the most vulnerable to ecosystem degradation, the researchers say.

The message is written large in Ecosystems and Human Well-being: the Biodiversity Synthesis Report.
It is the latest in a series of detailed documents to come out of the MA, a remarkable tome drawn up by 1,300 researchers from 95 nations over four years.

The MA pulls together the current state of knowledge and in its latest release this week focuses specifically on biodiversity and the likely impacts its continued loss will have on human society.

Even faster

In one sense, and precisely because it is a synthesis, the new document contains few surprises. It is, nonetheless, a startling - and depressing - read.

A third of all amphibians, a fifth of mammals and an eighth of all birds are now threatened with extinction. It is thought 90% of the large predatory fish in the oceans have gone since the beginning of industrial trawling.
And these are just the vertebrates - the species we know most about. Ninety percent of species, maybe more, have not even been catalogued by science yet.

"Changes in biodiversity were more rapid in the last 50 years than at any time in human history," said Dr Georgina Mace, the director of science at the Institute of Zoology, in London, UK, and an MA synthesis team member.

"And when you look to the future, to various projections and scenarios, we expect those changes to continue and in some circumstances to accelerate.
"Future models are very uncertain but all of them tell us that as we move into the next 100 years, we'll be seeing extinction rates that are a thousand to 10,000 times those in the fossil record."

'Invisible services'

One feature that sets the MA apart from previous projects of its kind is the way it defines ecosystems in terms of the "services", or benefits, that people get from them.

Some of these services are obvious - they are "provisional": timber for building; fish for food; fibres to make clothes.

At another level, these services are largely unseen - the recycling of nutrients, pollination and seed dispersal, climate control, the purification of water and air - but without these "support" and "regulating" systems, life on Earth would soon collapse.

Full story Signs Of The Times

China in national bird flu alert

This line from the article stands out "people need not be too worried" I'm not sure what that means, but it makes me worry.

Infected birds could introduce the virus along their migration routes China has ordered nationwide emergency measures to try to stop the spread of bird flu after discovering that wild geese had been killed by the virus. Agriculture officials say the migratory birds may have brought a more virulent flu strain into China from South East Asia, Xinhua official news agency said.

Tests confirmed that the geese found dead in Qinghai province had been infected with the H5N1 virus.

The virus has killed at least 53 people in South East Asia since late 2003.
China has had confirmed outbreaks of H5N1 in birds before, but no-one has yet died from avian flu on the mainland.

In Hong Kong, six people died after being infected when the strain spread from wildfowl to chickens to humans in 1997.

Health experts continue to warn that any mutation of bird flu could lead to a world pandemic.

Quarantine

An expert from the national bird flu reference laboratory, Cui Shangjin, told Xinhua that "people need not be too worried" as the controls introduced should be effective.

The measures include:

Banning people from habitats of migratory birds
Immunising poultry raised near habitats and routes of migratory birds
Asking public to stop contact with poultry
Introducing quarantine measures in Qinghai
The agriculture ministry said the dead birds were found in early May on Bird Island, a research centre and wildfowl reserve popular with tourists on the shores of Lake Qinghai.

Some are believed to have migrated from South East Asia, but officials did not give any details.

China's most recent confirmed case of bird flu occurred last July in the east of the country.

The H5N1 strain of bird flu has been confirmed in eight south-east Asian countries since 2003, including Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia where people have died.

The World Health Organization has warned of the great potential threat should the virus develop the capacity to spread easily between humans.

More News Stories Here

HIV is 'out of control' in India

BBC
A senior Aids expert has warned that HIV in India is "out of control".
The executive director of the Global Fund to Fight Aids said that the epidemic in India is spreading rapidly and nothing is being done to stop it.
Richard Feachem warned that India has overtaken South Africa as the country with the most HIV positive patients.

He warned that the epidemic has spread so quickly that India needed to "wake up" and take the problem seriously, otherwise millions of people will die.

Official statistics 'wrong'
"The epidemic [in India] is growing very rapidly. It is out of control. There is nothing happening in India today that is big or serious enough to prevent it," Mr Feachem said.

He warned that India has now overtaken South Africa as the country with the highest number of people living with Aids or the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV.

"Official statistics show India in second place and South Africa in first place," he said, "but the official statistics are wrong. India is in first place," he told the AFP news agency.

Latest figures provided by the UN agency UNAids - released in July 2004 - show that South Africa had the highest total of people with HIV or Aids in the world, with an estimated 5.3 million infected adults and children in a range of 4.5 to 6.2 million.

India's total was put at 5.1 million, but the range estimate was far wider - from 2.5 to 8.5 million - because of the lack of reliable data there in relation to the HIV pandemic.

India has to wake up and India has to take this very, very seriouslyRichard Feachem, executive director, Global Fund to Fight Aids
Mr Feachem warned that the illness would spread faster among India's Hindu population than among Muslims, because Muslims tend to be circumcised, which he said was "an acknowledged protective factor" against the Aids virus.

Widespread ignorance

read full article at Signs Of The Times

BLACK AND WHITE AND FULL OF CRAP

Lies Run Big, Facts Small in U.S. Media

By Ted Rall Tue May 10 2005

NEW YORK--One year ago the American media was pushing the Pat Tillman story with the heavy rotation normally reserved for living celebs like Michael Jackson. Tillman, the former NFL player who turned down a multi-million dollar football contract to fight inIraq and Afghanistan, became a centerpiece of the right's Hamas-style death cult when he lost his life in the mountains of southeastern Afghanistan. To supporters of the wars and to many football fans, Tillman embodied ideals of self-sacrifice and post-9/11 butt-kicking in a hard-bodied shell of chisel-chinned masculinity on steroids.

Tillman's quintessential nobility, we were told, was borne out by the story of his death--a tale that earned him a posthumous Silver Star. Whether you were for or against Bush's wars, Americans were told, Tillman's valor showed why you should support the troops. Young men were encouraged to emulate his praiseworthy example.

Several thousand mourners gathered at Tillman's May 3, 2004 memorial service to hear marquee names including Arizona Senator John McCain called upon all Americans to "be worthy of the sacrifices made on our behalf." "Tillman died trying to save fellow members of the 75th Ranger Regiment caught in a crush of enemy fire," the Arizona Republic quoted a fellow soldier addressing the crowd. Tillman, said his friend and comrade-at-arms, had told his fellow soldiers "to seize the tactical high ground from the enemy" to draw enemy fire away from another U.S. platoon trapped in an ambush. "He directly saved their lives with those moves. Pat sacrificed his life so that others could live." It was, as the Washington Post wrote, a "storybook personal narrative"--one recounted on hundreds of front pages and network newscasts.

It was also a lie.

As sharp-eyed readers learned a few months ago from single-paragraph articles buried deep inside their newspapers, Pat Tillman died pointlessly, a hapless victim of "friendly fire" who never got the chance to choose between bravery and cowardice. As if that wasn't bad enough, the Washington Post now reports thatPentagon and White House officials knew the truth "within days" after his April 22, 2004 shooting by fellow Army Rangers but "decided not to inform Tillman's family or the public until weeks after" the nationally televised martyr-a-thon.

It gets worse. So desperate were the military brass to carry off their propaganda coup that they lied to Tillman's brother, a fellow soldier who arrived on the scene shortly after the incident, about how he died. Writing in an army report, Brigadier General Gary Jones admits that the official cover-up even included "the destruction of evidence": the army burned Tillman's Ranger uniform and body armor to hide the fact that he had died in a hail of American bullets, fired by troops who had "lost situational awareness to the point they had no idea where they were."

"We didn't want the world finding out what actually happened," one soldier told Jones. A perfect summary of the war on terrorism.

The weapons of mass destruction turned out to be a figment of Donald Rumsfeld's imagination. The Thanksgiving turkey Bush presented to the troops turned out to be plastic, as much of a staged photo op as the gloriously iconic and phony toppling of Saddam's statue in Baghdad by jubilant Iraqi civilians--well, actually a few dozen marines and CIA-financed operatives. So many of the Administration's "triumphs" have been exposed as frauds that one has to wonder whether that was really Saddam in the spider hole.

We shouldn't blame the White House for producing lies; that's what politicians do. But we expect better from the media who disseminate them.

Full Article

Human babies 'grown in lab'

I wonder if the labratory can grow a soul to go with that baby.

By Oliver Stallwood, Metro5 May 2005
Human eggs which could grow into embryos have been created in a laboratory for the first time, scientists announced yesterday.
They were created by scraping stem cells off the surface of ovaries and exposing them to a chemical which stimulated growth.
The breakthrough suggests limitless supplies of eggs could be grown, solving the problem of the acute shortage of donor eggs for infertile women wanting IVF treatment.
But the idea has horrified pro-life groups after scientists admitted they could use the technique to 'farm' embryos for their research.
The procedure was tested by a University of Tennessee team, which took ovarian stem cells from five women aged 39 to 52.
Cells which were treated with a type of oestrogen called phenol red grew into healthy eggs.
The US researchers say their technique offers hope to cancer sufferers who become infertile through chemotherapy. They also believe they could extend the fertility of a woman nearing the menopause by between ten and 12 years.
Prof Antonin Bukovsky said it offered 'new strategies' for treatment of female infertility.
Fertility watchdogs will have to approve the technique for use in Britain but welcomed its apparent medical benefits.
But pro-life campaigner Matthew O'Gorman said: 'The artificial harvesting of eggs is synonymous with the intention to manufacture human beings for research. This is unethical, unnecessary and unacceptable.'

Signs Of The Times

Superbugs

Last Updated Sat, 30 Apr 2005 16:08:55 EDTCBC News
TORONTO - Canada geese can carry antibiotic-resistant superbugs and may be spreading bacteria such as E. coli and salmonella wherever they migrate, a study suggests.
Researchers with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control spent months testing goose feces from four water areas in Georgia and North Carolina to see if the birds could pick up and deposit E. coli.
They found antibiotic-resistant strains even though the birds hadn't been treated with drugs.
Geese from a North Carolina flock that often lingered near a pig farm had particularly high levels of the superbugs – and often showed resistance to more than one antibiotic, the researchers found.
Pig farms, like other livestock-rearing operations, can use high levels of antibiotics to tamp down diseases.
"Some of these geese were landing in a lagoon that had some run-off from a pig operation," said Dr. Scott Weese, of the Ontario Veterinary College in Guelph.
"So presumably there was resistance in E. coli from some of the pigs. The geese landed in the environment and through just normal eating or grooming in that environment, they ingested the E. coli."
Although the flocks observed were non-migratory, the U.S. study – posted on the CDC's Emerging Infectious Diseases website – concludes that Canada geese could spread the pathogens.
"This species could serve to disperse bacteria between widely separated locations," warned the study, to be published in the June issue of a medical journal called Emerging Infectious Diseases.
"In addition, since these birds use farm ponds and waste lagoons and graze on pastures inhabited by cattle and other livestock, the opportunities exist for new health problems in wildlife populations to emerge."
Weese, who studies diseases that can pass between humans and animals, said that scientists have recently realized that some pathogens previously thought to be found either in animals or in humans are actually found in both.
However, he said the study shouldn't spark panic. The kinds of bugs found in the birds, E. coli and salmonella, are common – and, study or no study, most people don't want to get very close to bird droppings.


From Signs Of The Times--Comment: Look at what our species has done to this world. We are poisoning the other species because of our thoughtless -- is it really "thoughtless"? -- pursuit of Mammon. If it comes back to haunt us, is it anything more than our due karmic retribution?