Biting the bullet: a call for action on lead-contaminated meat in food-banks

Each year in the United States, food banks receive more than one million kilograms of donated hunted game meat. The National Rifle Association’s (NRA’s) Hunters for the Hungry initiative has established programs in more than 40 states for hunters to take their harvested game animal to a meat processing facility and indicate intent to donate the resulting processed and packaged meat to a local food bank. Most donated game meat is ground deer meat (venison); other donated game includes wild hog and goose. Even though the presence of ammunition-derived metallic lead fragments in donated firearms-hunted meat has been recognized for more than a decade, most of the donated hunted meat is not inspected to discard meat containing lead fragments. An underlying lack of food safety standards for adulterated donated food increases risks to low-income recipients, who are already disproportionately affected by elevated blood lead levels (BLLs).2 Primary prevention is needed for this overlooked source of lead exposure.publishedVersio

Intersexuality and the Cricket Frog Decline: Historic and Geographic Trends

Exposure to anthropogenic endocrine disruptors has been listed as one of several potential causes of amphibian declines in recent years. We examined gonads of 814 cricket frogs (Acris crepitans) collected in Illinois and deposited in museum collections to elucidate relationships between the decline of this species in Illinois and the spatial and temporal distribution of individuals with intersex gonads. Compared with the preorganochlorine era studied (1852–1929), the percentage of intersex cricket frogs increased during the period of industrial growth and initial uses of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) (1930–1945), was highest during the greatest manufacture and use of p,p-dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) and PCBs (1946–1959), began declining with the increase in public concern and environmental regulations that reduced and then prevented sales of DDT in the United States (1960–1979), and continued to decline through the period of gradual reductions in environmental residues of organochlorine pesticides and PCBs in the midwestern United States (1980–2001). The proportion of intersex individuals among those frogs was highest in the heavily industrialized and urbanized northeastern portion of Illinois, intermediate in the intensively farmed central and northwestern areas, and lowest in the less intensively managed and ecologically more diverse southern part of the state. Records of deposits of cricket frog specimens into museum collections indicate a marked reduction in numbers from northeastern Illinois in recent decades. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that endocrine disruption contributed to the decline of cricket frogs in Illinois

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

One Health and Cyanobacteria in Freshwater Systems: Animal Illnesses and Deaths Are Sentinel Events for Human Health Risks

Harmful cyanobacterial blooms have adversely impacted human and animal health for thousands of years. Recently, the health impacts of harmful cyanobacteria blooms are becoming more frequently detected and reported. However, reports of human and animal illnesses or deaths associated with harmful cyanobacteria blooms tend to be investigated and reported separately. Consequently, professionals working in human or in animal health do not always communicate findings related to these events with one another. Using the One Health concept of integration and collaboration among health disciplines, we systematically review the existing literature to discover where harmful cyanobacteria-associated animal illnesses and deaths have served as sentinel events to warn of potential human health risks. We find that illnesses or deaths among livestock, dogs and fish are all potentially useful as sentinel events for the presence of harmful cyanobacteria that may impact human health. We also describe ways to enhance the value of reports of cyanobacteria-associated illnesses and deaths in animals to protect human health. Efficient monitoring of environmental and animal health in a One Health collaborative framework can provide vital warnings of cyanobacteria-associated human health risks

Transdisciplinary and social-ecological health frameworks—Novel approaches to emerging parasitic and vector-borne diseases

Ecosystem Health, Conservation Medicine, EcoHealth, One Health, Planetary Health and GeoHealth are inter-related disciplines that underpin a shared understanding of the functional prerequisites of health, sustainable vitality and wellbeing. All of these are based on recognition that health interconnects species across the planet, and they offer ways to more effectively tackle complex real-world challenges. Herein we present a bibliometric analysis to document usage of a subset of such terms by journals over time. We also provide examples of parasitic and vector-borne diseases, including malaria, toxoplasmosis, baylisascariasis, and Lyme disease. These and many other diseases have persisted, emerged or re-emerged, and caused great harm to human and animal populations in developed and low income, biodiverse nations around the world, largely because of societal drivers that undermined natural processes of disease prevention and control, which had developed through co-evolution over millennia. Shortcomings in addressing drivers has arisen from a lack or coordinated efforts among researchers, health stewards, societies at large, and governments. Fortunately, specialists collaborating under transdisciplinary and socio-ecological health umbrellas are increasingly integrating established and new techniques for disease modeling, prediction, diagnosis, treatment, control, and prevention. Such approaches often emphasize conservation of biodiversity for health protection, and they provide novel opportunities to increase the efficiency and probability of success. Keywords: Baylisascariasis, Conservation Medicine, EcoHealth, Ecosystem Health, GeoHealth, Integrative research, Lyme disease, Malaria, One Health, Planetary Health, Social-ecological systems, Toxoplasmosis, Transdisciplinarit

Appendix C. Descriptive statistics for the explanatory variables for the 18 surveyed wetlands included in the analyses.

Descriptive statistics for the explanatory variables for the 18 surveyed wetlands included in the analyses