Country’s swift response is distinct from the handling of the HIV crisis 20 years ago. Have lessons been learnt?
Twenty years ago Nelson Mandela made an impassioned plea for international cooperation on “one of the greatest threats humankind has faced”.
Aids was ravaging lives and overwhelming health systems, at its peak killing up to 1,000 people a day in South Africa.
Continue reading...Exclusively compiled data from the Hadley Centre’s supercomputer shows alarming climate trajectory
The human fingerprint on the climate is now unmistakable and will become increasingly evident over the coming decades, the UK Met Office has confirmed after 30 years of pioneering study.
Since the 1990s, global temperatures have warmed by half a degree, Arctic sea ice has shrunk by almost 2 million km2, sea-levels have risen by about 10cm and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by 60 parts per million (17%), according to figures exclusively compiled for the Guardian to mark the 30th anniversary of the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for climate science and services.
Continue reading...Elon Musk’s SpaceX, in partnership with Nasa, to launch Falcon 9 rocket from Florida carrying two American astronauts
In a historic moment a decade in the making, the skies above Florida will light up on Wednesday when the launch of a rocket born from a groundbreaking public-private partnership returns the United States to the business of human spaceflight.
Not since the retirement of Nasa’s space shuttle fleet in 2011 has the US possessed the capability to send its own astronauts into orbit, and the success of this week’s mission, formally known as SpaceX Demo-2, is likely to shape the direction of the space agency’s near-Earth ambitions for a generation.
Continue reading...Global competition for kits and national constraints cause concern as lockdowns ease
Public health experts have warned about the risks of low supplies of coronavirus test kits as lockdowns in African countries begin to ease and urban populations become more mobile.
Different countries on the continent have adopted a range of testing strategies, but international competition for test kits and a lack of global coordination of resources have meant many African countries are testing with significantly limited reach.
Continue reading...WHO warns of second peak as global cases pass 5.5m; Irish taoiseach Leo Varadkar denies picnic with friends was rule breach; world health leaders urge green recovery
I’m handing over to my esteemed colleague Kevin Rawlinson shortly, so I’ll leave you with a summary of today’s main global developments on the coronavirus pandemic:
A diplomatic rift has broken out between Tanzania and the US. The East African nation said it had summoned the top official at the US embassy to object to an advisory that warned of “exponential growth” of Covid-19 cases in the country.
Tanzania’s divisive leader John Magufuli has repeatedly played down the gravity of the coronavirus pandemic, appearing to model his response on the early approach taken by Donald Trump in the US.
Continue reading...While colour of body changes little, legs are more translucent to help amphibians to blend in
The mystery of why glass frogs have see-through skin has been solved, scientists say: the unusual feature is a type of camouflage.
Glass frogs are found in tropical Central and South America, and get their name from their skin.
Continue reading...Malaria drug taken by Trump could raise risk of death and heart problems, study shows
The World Health Organization has said it will temporarily drop hydroxychloroquine — the malaria drug Donald Trump said he is taking as a precaution — from its global study into experimental coronavirus treatments after safety concerns.
The WHO’s director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in light of a paper published last week in the Lancet that showed people taking hydroxychloroquine were at higher risk of death and heart problems than those who were not, it would pause the hydroxychloroquine arm of its solidarity global clinical trial.
Continue reading...Dominic Cummings will not resign; WHO drops hydroxychloroquine from global study into experimental coronavirus treatments. This blog is now closed
We’ve fired up a brand new blog at the link below – follow me there for the latest:
Related: Coronavirus live news: WHO drops hydroxychloroquine trial as Mexico death toll questioned
The White House on Monday issued a statement amending the timing of the start of new restrictions on travel from Brazil to the United States to 11.59pm Eastern Time on Tuesday, 26 May.
The White House announced on Sunday that it was restricting travel from Brazil to the United States, two days after the South American nation became the world’s No. 2 hotspot for coronavirus cases.
In its original announcement, it said the restrictions would come into force on 28 May.
Chile’s president says hospitals are ‘very close to limit’, France records lowest number of daily Covid-19 cases since March, India restarts domestic flights
President Donald Trump has further limited travel to the US from the world’s coronavirus hotspots by denying entry to foreigners coming from Brazil, which is second to the US in the number of confirmed cases.
Trump had already banned certain travellers from China, Europe, the United Kingdom and Ireland and, to a lesser extent, Iran. He has not moved to ban travel from Russia, which has the world’s third-highest caseload, approximately 20,000 fewer than Brazil’s.
Continue reading...World’s top drug firms turned down proposals for work on pathogens like coronavirus
The world’s largest pharmaceutical companies rejected an EU proposal three years ago to work on fast-tracking vaccines for pathogens like coronavirus to allow them to be developed before an outbreak, the Guardian can reveal.
The plan to speed up the development and approval of vaccines was put forward by European commission representatives sitting on the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) – a public-private partnership whose function is to back cutting-edge research in Europe – but it was rejected by industry partners on the body.
Continue reading...Falcon 9 rocket to make history as billionaire seeks to commercialise space travel
Elon Musk’s SpaceX company hopes to make history on Wednesday by launching the first astronauts into space from US soil in nine years, as the billionaire takes the next step in his dream to commercialise space travel.
Donald Trump will be among the spectators at Kennedy space centre in Florida to witness the launch, which has been given the green light despite the coronavirus lockdown.
Continue reading...Scientist who oversaw the response to Sars says country has failed the vulnerable
The predecessor of Sweden’s state epidemiologist has broken her silence on the country’s controversial coronavirus strategy, saying she now believes the authorities should have put in place tougher restrictions in the early stages of the pandemic to bring the virus under control.
Annika Linde, who oversaw Sweden’s response to swine flu and Sars as state epidemiologist from 2005 to 2013, had until now expressed support for her country’s approach under her successor, Anders Tegnell.
But she has now become the first member of the public health establishment to break ranks, saying she has changed her mind as a result of Sweden’s relatively high death toll compared with that of its neighbours, Denmark, Norway, and Finland.
“I think that we needed more time for preparedness. If we had shut down very early ... we would have been able, during that time, to make sure that we had what was necessary to protect the vulnerable,” Linde told the Observer.
Continue reading...The Royal Society president says scientists must not be made scapegoats for policy failures
In 1981, a virus that had jumped the species barrier some decades earlier to infect humans began to wreak havoc among the gay community in San Francisco and New York. A taskforce was set up to study the cause of this disease, and it took a few years to identify HIV as the definitive cause of Aids and its genome to be sequenced, and nearly 15 years before a cocktail of drugs meant that having an HIV infection was no longer a certain death sentence.
Forty years later, the cause of the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan was identified as a new coronavirus Sars-CoV-2, and its sequence determined in a matter of weeks. That, in turn, paved the way for a sensitive test for infection and, now, antibody tests for people who may have had the disease. That we know so much in such record time is due to sustained international investment in science.
Continue reading...France asks citizens to avoid foreign trips; US likely to impose travel restrictions on Brazil; Afghanistan cases top 10,000
The Daily Mail - usually one of Boris Johnson’s supporters in the press - has called on the prime minister to sack Dominic Cummings, trailing its headline with the following:
In the clearest way, Dominic Cummings has violated the spirit and letter of the lockdown. Boris Johnson says he ‘totally gets’ how the public feels about this. Clearly he totally doesn’t. Neither man has displayed a scintilla of contrition for this breach of trust. Do they think we are fools? For the good of the government and the nation, Mr Cummings must resign. Or the prime minister must sack him. No ifs. No buts.
The White House has announced it is prohibiting foreigners from traveling to the US if they had been in Brazil in the last two weeks, two days after the South American nation became the world No. 2 hot spot for coronavirus cases.
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the new restrictions would help ensure foreign nationals do not bring additional infections to the US, but would not apply to the flow of commerce between the new countries.
Continue reading...The Swedes were the Brexiters’ poster nation, but now have Europe’s worst death rate
Covid-19 is nature’s way of making bad situations worse. From the moment it turned the world upside down, you could have predicted that the Chinese Communist party would have arrested whistleblowers and covered up the threat to humanity. It’s what it does best, after all.
You would not have needed mystical powers to divine that Viktor Orbán would have used a pandemic as an excuse to turn Hungary into the European Union’s first dictatorship. Nor did it take a modern Nostradamus to foresee that, if you put men who care nothing for competence, complexity, or the difference between truth and falsehood in power, you will live to regret it. Or in the case of tens of thousands who trusted Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, die needless deaths.
Continue reading...Author Bernardine Evaristo, broadcaster Hugh Pym, playwright James Graham and more pen letters to themselves, to be opened in May 2021
James Graham, playwright
Continue reading...Archaeologists face surfeit of mammoths after bones found at airport under construction north of Mexico City
Archaeologists have found the bones of about 60 mammoths at an airport under construction just north of Mexico City, near human-built “traps” where more than a dozen mammoths were found last year.
Both discoveries reveal how appealing the area – once a shallow lake – was for the mammoths, and how erroneous was the classic vision of groups of fur-clad hunters with spears chasing mammoths across a plain.
Continue reading...Malaria drug should not be used to treat coronavirus, scientists say, after study shows high death rate
Hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug Donald Trump is taking to prevent Covid-19, has increased deaths in patients treated with it in hospitals around the world, a study has shown.
A major study of the way hydroxychloroquine and its older version, chloroquine, have been used on six continents – without clinical trials – reveals a sobering picture. Scientists said the results meant the drug should no longer be given to Covid-19 patients except in proper research settings.
Continue reading...In San Luis Potosí, cases of Covid-19 are rising, but not everyone is taking lockdown seriously. Photographer Mauricio Palos looks at how the outbreak has affected his home town
In San Luis Potosí, a city in central Mexico, some people believe the coronavirus is an invention by the government. They are sharing memes, videos and recordings with misinformation, in which people tell you that in the hospitals they drain the fluid from your knees and planes spray the city with the virus at night.
Continue reading...Poverty, hunger and the threat of being shot by police make life under strict lockdown harder for one expectant mother
Millions of people in the Philippine capital, Manila, have spent more than two months under lockdown. The densely populated city, once notorious for its heaving traffic, has been transformed into a ghost town. Residents who do not perform essential work have been asked to stay at home and are barred from leaving their neighbourhoods. Rights groups have warned over the brutal manner in which the restrictions have been enforced. In one instance, curfew violators were put in dog cages, while others have been forced to sit in the midday sun as punishment. President Rodrigo Duterte has told police they can shoot anyone deemed to be causing trouble during the lockdown.
Last week, the government announced an extension of the lockdown until 31 May, making it one of the strictest and longest quarantines in the world.
Continue reading...