Health co-benefits of climate change action in Italy

The climate breakdown is increasingly affecting the health of people around the world. As weather extremes intensify, the global health burden of unhealthy diets, sedentary lifestyles, and air pollution increases too. Against this backdrop, overstretched health systems can take stock of the co-benefits that a low carbon transition could deliver if health is prioritised in climate policies.1 Yet, as pointed out in a recent commentary,2 the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, UK, put little focus on health-related goals. Similarly, health is often disregarded in countries’ nationally determined contributions and in national climate policies. The dissociation between public health policy and climate action translates into millions of avoidable adverse health outcomes and deaths each year. For example, reducing greenhouse gas emissions also reduces the effect of air pollution, which is the largest environmental cause of disease and mortality in Europe in terms of measurable effect

The multisensory function of the human primary visual cortex

It has been nearly 10 years since Ghazanfar and Schroeder (2006) proposed that the neocortex is essentially multisensory in nature. However, it is only recently that sufficient and hard evidence that supports this proposal has accrued. We review evidence that activity within the human primary visual cortex plays an active role in multisensory processes and directly impacts behavioural outcome. This evidence emerges from a full pallet of human brain imaging and brain mapping methods with which multisensory processes are quantitatively assessed by taking advantage of particular strengths of each technique as well as advances in signal analyses. Several general conclusions about multisensory processes in primary visual cortex of humans are supported relatively solidly. First, haemodynamic methods (fMRI/PET) show that there is both convergence and integration occurring within primary visual cortex. Second, primary visual cortex is involved in multisensory processes during early post-stimulus stages (as revealed by EEG/ERP/ERFs as well as TMS). Third, multisensory effects in primary visual cortex directly impact behaviour and perception, as revealed by correlational (EEG/ERPs/ERFs) as well as more causal measures (TMS/tACS). While the provocative claim of Ghazanfar and Schroeder (2006) that the whole of neocortex is multisensory in function has yet to be demonstrated, this can now be considered established in the case of the human primary visual cortex

Perceptual and Semantic Contributions to Repetition Priming of Environmental Sounds

Repetition of environmental sounds, like their visual counterparts, can facilitate behavior and modulate neural responses, exemplifying plasticity in how auditory objects are represented or accessed. It remains controversial whether such repetition priming/suppression involves solely plasticity based on acoustic features and/or also access to semantic features. To evaluate contributions of physical and semantic features in eliciting repetition-induced plasticity, the present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study repeated either identical or different exemplars of the initially presented object; reasoning that identical exemplars share both physical and semantic features, whereas different exemplars share only semantic features. Participants performed a living/man-made categorization task while being scanned at 3T. Repeated stimuli of both types significantly facilitated reaction times versus initial presentations, demonstrating perceptual and semantic repetition priming. There was also repetition suppression of fMRI activity within overlapping temporal, premotor, and prefrontal regions of the auditory "what” pathway. Importantly, the magnitude of suppression effects was equivalent for both physically identical and semantically related exemplars. That the degree of repetition suppression was irrespective of whether or not both perceptual and semantic information was repeated is suggestive of a degree of acoustically independent semantic analysis in how object representations are maintained and retrieve

Multisensory Interactions within Human Primary Cortices Revealed by BOLD Dynamics

Whether signals from different sensory modalities converge and interact within primary cortices in humans is unresolved, despite emerging evidence in animals. This is partially because of debates concerning the appropriate analyses of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data in response to multisensory phenomena. Using event-related fMRI, we observed that simple auditory stimuli (noise bursts) activated primary visual cortices and that simple visual stimuli (checkerboards) activated primary auditory cortices, indicative of multisensory convergence. Moreover, analyses of blood oxygen level-dependent response dynamics revealed facilitation of hemodynamic response peak latencies and slopes for multisensory auditory-visual stimuli versus either unisensory condition, indicative of multisensory interactions within primary sensory cortices. Neural processing at the lowest cortical levels can be modulated by interactions between the senses. Temporal information in fMRI data can reveal these modulations and overcome analytic and interpretational challenges of more traditional procedures. In addition to providing an essential translational link with animal models, these results suggest that longstanding notions of cortical organization need to be revised to include multisensory interactions as an inherent component of functional brain organizatio

Tracing the footprints of SARS-CoV-2 in oceanic waters

The detection of SARS-CoV-2 in water environments has predominantly focused on wastewater, neglecting its presence in oceanic waters. This study aimed to fill this knowledge gap by investigating the occurrence of SARS-CoV-2 in remote sea and oceanic waters, at large distances from the coastline. Forty-three 500-liter samples were collected between May 2022 and January 2023 from the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, the Arctic region, the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. Using molecular detection methods including real-time RT-qPCR and nested PCR followed by sequencing, we successfully detected SARS-CoV-2 RNA in 7 of the 43 marine water samples (16.3 %), and specifically in samples taken from the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. The estimated concentrations of SARS-CoV-2 genome copies in the positive samples ranged from 6 to 470 per 100 l. The presence of mutations characteristic of the Omicron variant was identified in these samples by amplicon sequencing. These findings provide evidence of the unforeseen presence of SARS-CoV-2 in marine waters even at distances of miles from the coastline and in open ocean waters. It is important to consider that these findings only display the occurrence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA, and further investigations are required to assess if infectious virus can be present in the marine environment

Electrical neuroimaging based on biophysical constraints

This paper proposes and implements biophysical constraints to select a unique solution to the bioelectromagnetic inverse problem. It first shows that the brain's electric fields and potentials are predominantly due to ohmic currents. This serves to reformulate the inverse problem in terms of a restricted source model permitting noninvasive estimations of Local Field Potentials (LFPs) in depth from scalp-recorded data. Uniqueness in the solution is achieved by a physically derived regularization strategy that imposes a spatial structure on the solution based upon the physical laws that describe electromagnetic fields in biological media. The regularization strategy and the source model emulate the properties of brain activity's actual generators. This added information is independent of both the recorded data and head model and suffices for obtaining a unique solution compatible with and aimed at analyzing experimental data. The inverse solution's features are evaluated with event-related potentials (ERPs) from a healthy subject performing a visuo-motor task. Two aspects are addressed: the concordance between available neurophysiological evidence and inverse solution results, and the functional localization provided by fMRI data from the same subject under identical experimental conditions. The localization results are spatially and temporally concordant with experimental evidence, and the areas detected as functionally activated in both imaging modalities are similar, providing indices of localization accuracy. We conclude that biophysically driven inverse solutions offer a novel and reliable possibility for studying brain function with the temporal resolution required to advance our understanding of the brain's functional networks

[SENTIERI Project: rationale and objectives].

The National strategic programme “Environment and health” was funded by the Ministry of Health and coordinated by the Istituto Superiore di Sanità. The Programme focused on “the health impact associated with residence in polluted sites, in areas affected by waste disposal/incineration facilities and exposure to air pollution in urban areas” and included six research projects (with a total of 41 units). One of the six projects called “Risk to health in polluted sites: exposure assessment, biomonitoring and epidemiological characterization” comprised ten units, eight of which were devoted to SENTIERI Project (Mortality study of residents in italian polluted sites). The Project started in 2007 and was completed in December 2010. The results are published in two supplements of Epidemiologia & Prevenzione. SENTIERI Project is the first report systematically discussing cause-specific mortality in populations living in IPSs. The results are based on the a priori evaluation of the evidence presented in the previous supplement (Pirastu et al., 2010), and on the consequent etiological hypotheses; the discussion takes into account possible confounding from socioeconomic deprivation. In this second Supplement, which is divided into two sections, the results of the mortality analysis for the 44 IPS included in the Project for the years 1995-2002 are presented. Some comments and operational guidance on further epidemiological characterization of these areas are also provided. The second section of the present Supplement is devoted to a thorough analysis of SENTIERI Project and to its future development. It includes several chapters describing new activities that are under way or planned. It is the Working Group’s opinion, and in particular of the editors, that additional epidemiological data about populations residing in IPSs are necessary for a deeper understanding of the health impact of polluted sites, and an appropriate detection of priority intervention in environmental remediation

Airborne dust and high temperatures are risk factors for invasive bacterial disease

Background The Sahel region of West Africa has the highest bacterial meningitis attack and case fatality rate in the world. The effect of climatic factors on patterns of invasive respiratory bacterial disease is not well documented. Objective We aimed to assess the link between climatic factors and occurrence of invasive respiratory bacterial disease in a Sahel region of Niger. Methods We conducted daily disease surveillance and climatic monitoring over an 8-year period between January 1, 2003, and December 31, 2010, in Niamey, Niger, to determine risk factors for bacterial meningitis and invasive bacterial disease. We investigated the mechanistic effects of these factors on Streptococcus pneumoniae infection in mice. Results High temperatures and low visibility (resulting from high concentrations of airborne dust) were identified as significant risk factors for bacterial meningitis. Dust inhalation or exposure to high temperatures promoted progression of stable asymptomatic pneumococcal nasopharyngeal carriage to pneumonia and invasive disease. Dust exposure significantly reduced phagocyte-mediated bacterial killing, and exposure to high temperatures increased release of the key pneumococcal toxin pneumolysin through increased bacterial autolysis. Conclusion Our findings show that climatic factors can have a substantial influence on infectious disease patterns, altering density of pneumococcal nasopharyngeal carriage, reducing phagocytic killing, and resulting in increased inflammation and tissue damage and consequent invasiveness. Climatic surveillance should be used to forecast invasive bacterial disease epidemics, and simple control measures to reduce particulate inhalation might reduce the incidence of invasive bacterial disease in regions of the world exposed to high temperatures and increased airborne dust