Uncertainty, Scarcity and Transparency: Public Health Ethics and Risk Communication in a Pandemic

Communicating public health guidance is key to mitigating risk during disasters and outbreaks, and ethical guidance on communication emphasizes being fully transparent. Yet, communication during the pandemic has sometimes been fraught, due in part to practical and conceptual challenges around being transparent. A particular challenge has arisen when there was both evolving scientific knowledge on COVID-19 and reticence to acknowledge that resource scarcity concerns were influencing public health recommendations. This essay uses the example of communicating public health guidance on masking in the United States to illustrate ethical challenges of developing and conveying public health guidance under twin conditions of uncertainty and resource scarcity. Such situations require balancing two key principles in public health ethics: the precautionary principle and harm reduction. Transparency remains a bedrock value to guide risk communication, but optimizing transparency requires consideration of additional ethical values in developing and implementing risk communication strategies

Silurian continental distributions, paleogeography, climatology, and biogeography

Continental orientations during the Silurian Period have been determined using paleoclimatic in addition to paleomagnetic data. The influence of climate on lithology is particularly marked during periods like the Silurian when epeiric seas were widespread and sedimentation was dominantly autochthonous (evaporites, carbonates, reefs, authigenic minerals) and therefore reflective of climate at the depositional site. During such times, with few large land areas in low latitudes, one would expect climatic patterns to have been more zonal than cellular, and also that long river systems (capable of transporting clastic sediments from wet to dry belts) would not have existed. Therefore, even allochthonous deposits, particularly thick sequences of coarse elastics can be added to the list of paleoclimatic indicators.Silurian northern hemisphere atmospheric circulation can be modeled on present patterns in the southern hemisphere because of the lack of significant land influence on climate. The wet-hot (10[deg]N--10[deg]S), dry-warm (10[deg]--30[deg]), wet-cool (30[deg]-60[deg]), dry-cold (60[deg]--pole) pattern is amply confirmed by Silurian sediment distribution on those paleocontinents whose orientations have been established from paleomagnetic measurements (Laurentia, Baltica, Siberia). Paleozoic sedimentation in these zones is as follows: 10[deg]N--10[deg]S, thick elastics and reefs associated with leading plate margins, and carbonates and reefs in the epeiric seas; 10[deg]--30[deg], evaporites, carbonates and reefs; 30[deg]--60[deg], clastics, coals and tillites; 60[deg]--pole mostly tillites. The other paleo-continents (Kazakhstania, North China, South China, Gondwana) can be oriented by using the above lithologic associations in ways consistent with their known convergent and collision patterns in the late Paleozoic. All were in relatively low latitudes with the exception of Gondwana which was over the South Pole. A large north polar ocean existed which must have had an ameliorating effect on climate in the northern hemisphere, while the opposite was true of the southern hemisphere.The conclusion that most paleocontinents had extensive epeiric seas and were positioned in low latitudes accounts for the cosmopolitan nature of Silurian faunas. Only Gondwana in the south (Clarkeia fauna), and Mongolia in the north (Tuvaella fauna) shows signs of provincialism and low faunal diversities. This situation can be contrasted with the Devonian, when the collision of Laurentia and Baltica resulted in land barriers and marked provincialism.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/22904/1/0000468.pd

Maternal starvation primes progeny response to nutritional stress

10.1371/journal.pgen.1009932PLoS Genetics1711e100993