The micro threat to sea life
Scientists working in the mid-Atlantic and south-west Indian Oceans have found evidence of microfibres being ingested by deep sea animals including hermit crabs, squat lobsters and sea cucumbers, revealing for the first time the environmental fallout of microplastic pollution. The U.K. government recently announced that it is to ban plastic microbeads, commonly found in cosmetics and cleaning materials, by the end of 2017. Researchers from the universities of Bristol and Oxford, working on the Royal Research Ship (RRS) James Cook at two sites, have now found evidence of microbeads inside creatures at depths of between 300m and 1,800m. This is the first time microplastics — which can enter the sea via the washing of clothes made from synthetic fabrics or from fishing line nets — have been shown to have been ingested by animals at such depth. The results are published in the journal Scientific Reports . — Science Daily
Thumbs up for today’s parenting
Guilt-ridden busy mothers and dads take heart: Mothers — and fathers — across most Western countries are spending more time with their children than parents did in the mid-1960s, according to a University of California, Irvine study. And time spent with children is highest among better-educated parents — a finding that somewhat surprised study co-author Judith Treas, UCI Chancellor’s Professor of sociology. “According to economic theory, higher wages should discourage well-educated parents from foregoing work to spend extra time with youngsters,” she said. “Also, they have the money to pay others to care for their children.”
Treas and co-author Giulia M. Dotti Sani, a postdoctoral fellow at Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, Italy, found that between 1965 and 2012, all but one of 11 Western nations showed an increase in the amount of time both parents spent with their children. The study was published online in the August issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family . In 1965, mothers spent a daily average of 54 minutes on child care activities, while mothers in 2012 averaged almost twice that at 104 minutes per day. Fathers’ time with children nearly quadrupled — 1965 dads spent a daily average of just 16 minutes with their children, while today's fathers spend about 59 minutes a day caring for them. — Science Daily
Zika transmission
The first Zika virus-related death in the continental U.S. occurred in June of this year, but even now, months later, two aspects of this case continue to puzzle health experts. First, why did this patient die? It is quite rare for a Zika infection to cause severe illness in adults, much less death. Second, how did another individual, who visited the first while in the hospital, become ill from Zika? This second patient did not do anything that was known at the time to put people at risk for contracting the virus. Researchers at the University of Utah School of Medicine and ARUP Laboratories in Salt Lake City begin to unravel the mystery in correspondence published online on September 28 in The New England Journal of Medicine . Details from the two cases point to an unusually high concentration of virus in the first patient’s blood as being responsible for his death. “This case expands our appreciation for how Zika virus can potentially spread from an infected patient to a non-infected patient without sexual contact or a mosquito vector,” says Marc Couturier, co author of the study. “This and any future cases will force the medical community to critically re-evaluate established triage processes for determining which patients receive Zika testing and which do not.” — Science Daily
Update on mosquito spit
Mosquito saliva influences transmission of viruses to a bitten mammalian host. For example, it contains factors that dampen the host immune response and so facilitate infection. A study published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases reports on a saliva protein with the opposite effect: D7, a protein present in Aedes aegypti saliva, binds to the Dengue virus (DENV) and inhibits its transmission to human cells and mice. Antibodies against D7, which are present in humans exposed to mosquito bites, might therefore facilitate virus transmission and enhance disease severity. The researchers had previously isolated proteins from the salivary glands of Aedes aegypti , the mosquito that transmits the dengue, Zika, and chikungunya viruses, and tested batches of proteins to see if they could either enhance or block DENV transmission to human cells. In this study, they focussed on proteins that could inhibit DENV.
