Journalist
By Neena Bhandari
SYDNEY, Australia, Jan 8 2020 (IPS) – As nature’s fury wreaked havoc across Australia, reducing to ashes all that came in its way – people, flora, fauna, picturesque historic towns and villages once popular with local and overseas tourists – it was unlike anything the country had witnessed before. The staggering scale and intensity of the devastation could best be summed up as apocalyptic.
SYDNEY, 26.12.19 (SciDev.Net): Australian scientists have successfully blocked the deadliest malaria parasite —- Plasmodium falciparum — in its transmission stage, paving the way for developing preventative therapies to stop the spread of the disease.
Lead researcher Justin Boddey from the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research and University of Melbourne says, “We have built on our previous studies, where we identified in the P. falciparum parasite an enzyme called plasmepsin V, an enzyme essential for the parasite to grow inside red blood cells. We showed that if you inhibit the enzyme’s activity then you can kill the parasites as they are growing in red blood cells.”
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© Copyright Neena Bhandari. All rights reserved. Republication, copying or using information from neenabhandari.com content is expressly prohibited without the permission of the writer and the media outlet syndicating or publishing the article.
By Neena Bhandari
Sydney, 03.12.2019 (SciDev.Net): Fifty-three people, including 48 children under the age of four years, have died of measles in the small Pacific island nation of Samoa, which is facing the worst outbreak of this highly contagious disease driven by low vaccination levels.
Samoa’s Prime Minister Tuilaepa Lupesoliai Neioti Aiono Sailele Malielegaoi announced on Monday (2 December) that all branches of government, except water and electricity departments, will be closed on Thursday and Friday this week and civil servants will be redeployed to help in the mass immunisation drive to vaccinate everybody up to the age of 60 years.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates Samoa’s total population immunity to be as low as 31 per cent. To prevent measles outbreaks, it is recommended that countries should aim to achieve and sustain at least 95 per cent immunisation coverage.
Continue reading on SciDev.Net Asia & Pacific Edition.
© Copyright Neena Bhandari. All rights reserved. Republication, copying or using information from neenabhandari.com content is expressly prohibited without the permission of the writer and the media outlet syndicating or publishing the article.
