Crônica de uma praga anunciada epidemias agrícolas e história ambiental do café nas Américas Chronicle of a plague foretold crop epidemics and the environmental history of coffee in the Americas

As epidemias agrícolas fornecem um ponto de vista privilegiado para a história ambiental global e transnacional de commodities. A epidemia da ferrugem, causada pelo fungo Hemileia nastatrix, é uma das mais sérias doenças que têm atingido a indústria global de café. No século XIX, ela devastou as plantações de café no Velho Mundo. Também reduziu agudamente a produção de café do tipo arábica na África, Ásia e no Pacífico. Esse foi um dos fatores que permitiu aos países da Américas dominarem a produção global no século XX. Essa epidemia foi detectada nas Américas pela primeira vez na década de 1970. A sua história nas Américas, e as tentativas de seu controle lançam luzes sobre dois paradigmas maiores que moldaram a história ambiental do café no final do século XX. São eles: o paradigma tecnicista, dominante entre meados do século XX até o início dos anos 1990; e o paradigma da sustentabilidade, cujo domínio emergiu em meados dos anos 1980 e se mantém até o presente.<br>Crop epidemics provide a portal into the global and transnational environmental history of commodities. The coffee rust epidemic, caused by the fungus Hemileia vastatrix, is one of the most serious diseases to have afflicted the global coffee industry. In the nineteenth century, it devastated the coffee plantations in the Old World. It sharply curtailed arabica coffee production in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. This was one of the factors that allowed the Americas do dominate global coffee production in the twentieth century. The coffee rust epidemic was first detected in the Americas in the 1970s. The history of the rust epidemic in the Americas, and attempts to control it, shed light on two major paradigms that shaped the environmental history of coffee in the late twentieth century. The paradigm of technification, which dominated from the mid-20th century to the early 1990s; and the paradigm of sustainability, which dominated emerged in the mid-1980s and continues to the present

New developments in small molecular compounds for anti-hepatitis C virus (HCV) therapy*

Infection with hepatitis C virus (HCV) affects approximately 170 million people worldwide. However, no vaccine or immunoglobulin is currently available for the prevention of HCV infection. The standard of care (SOC) involving pegylated interferon-α (PEG-IFN α) plus ribavirin (RBV) for 48 weeks results in a sustained virologic response in less than 50% of patients with chronic hepatitis C genotype 1, the most prevalent type of HCV in North America and Europe. Recently, reliable in vitro culture systems have been developed for accelerating antiviral therapy research, and many new specifically targeted antiviral therapies for hepatitis C (STAT-C) and treatment strategies are being evaluated in clinical trials. These new antiviral agents are expected to improve present treatment significantly and may potentially shorten treatment duration. The aim of this review is to summarize the current developments in new anti-HCV drugs