Ready or Not? Protecting the Public's Health From Diseases, Disasters, and Bioterrorism, 2008

Examines ten indicators to assess progress in state readiness to respond to bioterrorism and other public health emergencies. Evaluates the federal government's and hospitals' preparedness. Makes suggestions for funding, restructuring, and other reforms

F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America's Future 2011

Outlines 2008-10 national and state obesity rates, health indicators, and policies to address the epidemic; regional, economic, and social barriers to healthy choices; impact of the 2010 healthcare reform and Let's Move initiative; and recommendations

Turbulence observations in a buoyant hydrothermal plume on the East Pacific Rise

Author Posting. © The Oceanography Society, 2012. This article is posted here by permission of The Oceanography Society for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Oceanography 25, no. 1 (2012): 180–181, doi:10.5670/oceanog.2012.15.Hot vent fluid enters the ocean at high-temperature hydrothermal vents, also known as black smokers. Because of the large temperature difference between the vent fluid and oceanic near-bottom waters, the hydrothermal effluent initially rises as a buoyant plume through the water column. During its rise, the plume engulfs and mixes with background ocean water. This process, called entrainment, gradually reduces the density of the rising plume until it reaches its level of neutral buoyancy, where the plume density equals that of the background water, and it begins to spread along a surface of constant density.The data presented here were collected in the context of National Science Foundation grants OCE-0425361 and OCE-0728766

Impact of Local Winter Cooling on the Melt of Pine Island Glacier, Antarctica

The rapid thinning of the ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea is generally attributed to basal melt driven by warm water originating from the continental slope. We examine the hypothesis that processes taking place on the continental shelf contribute significantly to the interannual variability of the ocean heat content and ice shelf melt rates. A numerical model is used to simulate the circulation of ocean heat and the melt of the ice shelves over the period 2006–2013. The fine model grid (grid spacing 1.5 km) explicitly resolves the coastal polynyas and mesoscale processes. The ocean heat content of the eastern continental shelf exhibits recurrent decreases around September with a magnitude that varies from year to year. The heat loss is primarily caused by surface heat fluxes along the eastern shore in areas of low ice concentration (polynyas). The cold winter water intrudes underneath the ice shelves and reduces the basal melt rates. Ocean temperatures upstream (i.e., at the shelf break) are largely constant over the year and cannot account for the cold events. The cooling is particularly marked in 2012 and its effect on the ocean heat content remains visible over the following years. The study suggests that ocean-atmosphere interactions in coastal polynyas contribute to the interannual variability of the melt of Pine Island Glacier

On the Role of Coastal Troughs in the Circulation of Warm Circumpolar Deep Water on Antarctic Shelves

Oceanic exchanges across the continental shelves of Antarctica play an important role in biological systems and the mass balance of ice sheets. The focus of this study is on the mechanisms responsible for the circulation of warm Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) within troughs running perpendicular to the continental shelf. This is examined using process-oriented numerical experiments with an eddy-resolving (1 km) 3D ocean model that includes a static and thermodynamically active ice shelf. Three mechanisms that create a significant onshore flow within the trough are identified: 1) a deep onshore flow driven by the melt of the ice shelf, 2) interaction between the longshore mean flow and the trough, and 3) interaction between a Rossby wave along the shelf break and the trough. In each case the onshore flow is sufficient to maintain the warm temperatures underneath the ice shelf and basal melt rates of O(1 m yr−1). The third mechanism in particular reproduces several features revealed by moorings from Marguerite Trough (Bellingshausen Sea): the temperature maximum at middepth, a stronger intrusion on the downstream edge of the trough, and the appearance of warm anticyclonic anomalies every week. Sensitivity experiments highlight the need to properly resolve the small baroclinic radii of these regions (5 km on the shelf)-simulations at 3-km resolution cannot reproduce mechanism 3 and the associated heat transport

Ready or Not? Protecting the Public\u27s Health from Diseases, Disasters, and Bioterrorism

While significant progress has been made to better protect the country from health emergencies, funding for essential programs has been cut, putting these improvements in jeopardy. Additionally, a number of critical areas of preparedness still have significant gaps, including surge capacity and biosurveillance systems, and these problems are less likely to be addressed as funding decreases

F as in Fat: How the Obesity Crisis Threatens America's Future, 2010

Discusses 2007-09 national and state obesity rates, health indicators, and policies; regional, economic, and social barriers to healthy choices; effects of the 2009 stimulus and 2010 healthcare reform on prevention; survey findings; and recommendations

Localization, epidemic transitions, and unpredictability of multistrain epidemics with an underlying genotype network

Mathematical disease modelling has long operated under the assumption that any one infectious disease is caused by one transmissible pathogen spreading among a population. This paradigm has been useful in simplifying the biological reality of epidemics and has allowed the modelling community to focus on the complexity of other factors such as population structure and interventions. However, there is an increasing amount of evidence that the strain diversity of pathogens, and their interplay with the host immune system, can play a large role in shaping the dynamics of epidemics. Here, we introduce a disease model with an underlying genotype network to account for two important mechanisms. One, the disease can mutate along network pathways as it spreads in a host population. Two, the genotype network allows us to define a genetic distance across strains and therefore to model the transcendence of immunity often observed in real world pathogens. We study the emergence of epidemics in this model, through its epidemic phase transitions, and highlight the role of the genotype network in driving cyclicity of diseases, large scale fluctuations, sequential epidemic transitions, as well as localization around specific strains of the associated pathogen. More generally, our model illustrates the richness of behaviours that are possible even in well-mixed host populations once we consider strain diversity and go beyond the "one disease equals one pathogen" paradigm