It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, February 24, 2025
Backyard poultry face HPAI risk when migrating mallards stop to rest
Cornell University
ITHACA, N.Y. – Knowing where, when and for how longmallard ducks – natural carriers of avian influenza – stop and rest as they migrate can help predict the probability that they will spread bird flu to backyard poultry flocks, according to a Cornell Univerity study.
The finding, published in Scientific Reports, takes an important step in explaining the transmission dynamics of bird flu, a strain also known as Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), and could one day inform people with backyard poultry of the best times to take extra precautions to isolate their birds from wild ones.
The researchers used a computer model to predict infection risk to backyard poultry, resident mallards and overwintering mute swans in Croatia, which serves as a stopover area for both migratory mallards and the swans. While mallards tolerate avian influenza well, it is fatal to mute swans; the dead birds can serve to alert people to the presence of bird flu that is otherwise hard to detect in the wild.
Though Croatia served as a study system in this paper, the results are relevant to other places, including the United States.
“The virus has jumped independently at different times from wild birds to dairy cows,” said Sebastian Llanos-Soto, a doctoral student in the lab of senior author Renata Ivanek, professor of epidemiology.
“There is an urgent need to improve our ability to predict the introduction of avian influenza at the wildlife-domestic animal interface and our study contributes to this goal,” Llanos-Soto said.
In the study, the computer model was informed with migratory data, with migratory mute swans arriving in Croatia between September and November to winter and returning to breeding grounds between February and April. Mallards arrive between October and November for a stopover of seven to 28 days before continuing on their migration through the Mediterranean-Black Sea flyway.
The model simulated the transmission of HPAI in an area considered to be of high risk for introduction into poultry farms via waterfowl. The model was validated with real-world bird and farm data from the study area.
The study was funded by the College of Veterinary Medicine; the Cornell Institute for Digital Agriculture; and the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
Transmission dynamics of highly pathogenic avian influenza among multiple waterfowl species and backyard poultry: the impact of the stopover period.
Article Publication Date
18-Feb-2025
A new strategy to promote healthy food choices
Odors influence value-based decision-making when viewing nutritional labels on drinks, pointing to the potential of using odors to promote healthy food decisions.
Poor food decisions and eating habits can contribute to excessive weight gain and health problems. Nutritional labels meant to convey healthiness instead may create negative expectations about taste or pose as a time-constraining hurdle for shoppers. Doris Schicker and Jessica Freiherr, from the Fraunhofer Institute for Process Engineering and Packaging, led a study in JNeurosci to explore whether pairing food labels with a sensory stimulus, like odor, affects how people perceive foods and thus promotes healthy shopping. The researchers imaged the brains of over 60 people as they interacted with drink labels complete with nutrition-related statements. Some labels were accompanied by odors. Odor-paired beverages were perceived more positively. Additionally, the presence of odor altered the activity of brain regions that process flavors and labels as well as brain regions associated with reward and decision-making. Thus, odors appear to improve label perception and, according to the authors, have the potential to promote healthy food choices.
JNeurosci was launched in 1981 as a means to communicate the findings of the highest quality neuroscience research to the growing field. Today, the journal remains committed to publishing cutting-edge neuroscience that will have an immediate and lasting scientific impact, while responding to authors' changing publishing needs, representing breadth of the field and diversity in authorship.
About The Society for Neuroscience
The Society for Neuroscience is the world's largest organization of scientists and physicians devoted to understanding the brain and nervous system. The nonprofit organization, founded in 1969, now has nearly 35,000 members in more than 95 countries.
LA JOLLA, CA—Children who experience multiple cases of dengue virus develop an army of dengue-fighting T cells, according to a new study led by scientists at La Jolla Institute for Immunology (LJI).
The findings, published recently in JCI Insights, suggest that these T cells are key to dengue virus immunity. In fact, most children who experienced two or more dengue infections showed very minor symptoms—or no symptoms at all—when they caught the virus again.
"We saw a significant T cell response in children who had been infected more than once before," says study leader and LJI Assistant Professor Daniela Weiskopf, Ph.D.
Dengue virus infects up to 400 million people each year, and there are few vaccines and no approved therapies available for any of the four species, or "serotypes," of the virus. The researchers hope their findings can inform the development of a dengue virus vaccine that prompts a similarly strong T cell response.
This research comes as dengue-carrying mosquitos expand their territory into new regions, including Southern California. Health officials in California reported the state's first-ever case of locally acquired dengue virus in 2023. Since then, Los Angeles County has reported 12 additional cases of locally acquired dengue virus, and San Diego County has confirmed two locally acquired cases.
"Dengue virus is expanding into areas where the majority of people have never seen the virus," says Weiskopf, who is a member of LJI's Center for Vaccine Innovation. "That will change the game."
T cells help fight dengue
Weiskopf and her colleagues set out to understand how T cells might sway the severity of dengue virus infection. Are T cells helping or hurting young patients?
After all, the immune system has to strike a careful balance when fighting viruses. A weak T cell response makes it tough to fight infection. On the other hand, an overzealous T cell response can cause harmful inflammation and potentially fatal complications.
The researchers studied a group of 71 children in Managua, Nicaragua, a region where dengue virus is endemic. Since 2004, study co-author Eva Harris, Ph.D., Director of the Center for Global Public Health at UC Berkeley, has worked with Nicaraguan scientists to study dengue infections in this patient group.
These children, ages 2 to 17, come in for regular blood draws to test for antibodies against dengue virus. By detecting a rise in these antibodies, compared to the previous year, researchers can tell if a child has dealt with a past dengue virus infection. Importantly, researchers can also use the blood test to catch inapparent cases of dengue infection—where a child has been exposed to the virus but is showing no clinical symptoms.
The researchers found that the number of dengue-fighting T cells in these children builds up with each infection, and these T cells appeared to be helping the pediatric patients.
Children with a history of two or more dengue infections were much less likely to show clinical symptoms if they caught the virus again. Meanwhile, children only infected once were more likely to show clinical symptoms of disease during a later infection.
Next steps toward a life-saving vaccine
The new study may offer context for why a recent dengue virus vaccine, called Dengvaxia, appeared safe and effective in just a subset of patients at risk for dengue infection. The vaccine was only FDA-approved for children who were ages 9 to 16—and lived in a dengue-endemic area, assuming that they have experienced dengue infection by that age. Subsequent licensure in other countries required an antigen test to prove previous exposure.
The vaccine didn't work if a person hadn't been exposed to dengue virus before. Could it be that their T cells weren't ready to jump into action?
As the new study suggests, it may take multiple dengue virus exposures to gain immunity. Weiskopf says scientists will continue to investigate how to harness T cells to fight dengue virus.
"There's a lot more work to be done," says Weiskopf.
This study was supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases/National Institutes of Health (grant P01 AI106695.) DOI: 10.1172/jci.insight.179771
Flooding remains the most destructive natural hazard in the United States, costing billions in damages annually, disrupting critical infrastructure and endangering lives. While urban areas often have access to substantial resources to tackle these challenges, rural communities face persistent barriers in mitigating flood risks. Recognizing these issues, Avantika Gori, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University, is leading an innovative project to close the gap. Together with Rice’s James Doss-Gollin, Andrew Juan at Texas A&M University and Keri Stephens at University of Texas at Austin, the team was recently awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant under the CHIRRP program (Confronting Hazards, Impacts and Risks for a Resilient Planet).
“Our goal is to create a flood management approach that truly serves rural communities — one that’s driven by science but centers around the people who are impacted the most,” Gori said.
Rural communities face distinct and persistent challenges in managing flood risk, Gori explained. First, flood hazards are often inaccurately delineated in these areas, making it difficult for communities to secure state and federal funding for mitigation projects. This lack of support exacerbates and deepens the urban-rural divide. Second, traditional risk metrics focus primarily on dollar damages, which do not adequately address the needs of rural communities. Instead, these communities prioritize resilience indicators such as road and business disruptions, displacement and the functionality of critical facilities. Third, a fundamental disconnect exists between community priorities and state or federal flood management policies. Government agencies often focus on extreme flood events, while local communities are more concerned with addressing the small-to-moderate floods that occur more frequently.
The team’s project addresses these gaps by introducing a performance-based, system dynamics framework that integrates hydroclimate variability, hydrology, machine learning, community knowledge and feedbacks between the physical and social systems. This approach enhances understanding of flood risks while emphasizing long-term community resilience.
“By integrating understanding of the weather dynamics that cause extreme floods, physics-based models of flooding and AI or machine learning tools together with an understanding of each community’s needs and vulnerabilities, we can better predict how different interventions will reduce a community’s risk,” said Doss-Gollin, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering.
The research will be implemented in two rural Texas communities grappling with persistent flood challenges. These case studies will demonstrate how linking global and regional hydroclimate variability with local hazard dynamics can create tailored, effective solutions. The project’s emphasis on collaboration ensures that community members are involved in every stage — from identifying priorities to implementing strategies.
This novel framework also incorporates resilience indicators such as business continuity, transportation access and functional critical facilities, ensuring that flood mitigation efforts benefit every aspect of rural life.
Beyond addressing flood risks in Texas, the project has broader implications for the future of flood-risk management across the U.S. By centering community needs and fostering partnerships among academia, local organizations and government agencies, the framework provides a blueprint for confronting climate change, aging infrastructure and population growth.
“This work is about more than flood science — it’s also about identifying ways to help communities understand flooding using words that reflect their values and priorities,” said Stephens. “We’re creating tools that empower communities to not only recover from disasters but to thrive long term.”
A key component of the project is public education. Efforts to strengthen scientific literacy, develop accessible training materials and prepare the next generation of leaders in convergent and transdisciplinary practices are central to its mission.
“We want to bring an Earth systems science approach to bear on solutions-oriented research,” said Juan. “Ultimately, we’re training the next generation of experts while equipping rural communities with the knowledge and capacity to address recurring floods now and in the future.”
Heat-stressed reefs may benefit from coral-dwelling crabs
For certain vulnerable corals, help is in the claws of a crab. Reporting in Proceedings Biological Sciences, researchers found that a species of branching coral benefitted from a reef-dwelling crab, especially when the coral was heat-stressed and wounded. The findings support the idea that positive species interactions can buffer coral reefs from multiple environmental threats.
Corals are what ecologists call “foundation species,” meaning that they’re integral to habitats and food webs. Understanding ecological factors that shield coral reefs from harm could inform conservation and restoration efforts.
“Foundation species like corals create the base of an ecosystem: They form structures that other species use for shelter, they modify the local environment, and they provide food for other organisms. Learning how these species respond to stress can help us design better strategies to conserve them — and, in turn, other species that rely on them — in an era of global change,” said first author Julianna Renzi, who conducted the research as a graduate student at the Duke University Marine Laboratory, part of the Nicholas School of the Environment.
Renzi is particularly interested in mutualism, a relationship between species that helps both. Many studies have investigated how positive species interactions reduce the effects of a single environmental stressor, like rising ocean temperatures. However, less work has explored how these beneficial relationships can counteract multiple, coinciding stressors, according to the authors.
For their study, Renzi and colleagues collected samples of Acropora aspera, a type of branching coral, from a designated research area in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef during a heat wave. They placed the coral samples in tanks fed with seawater and exposed them to one or a combination of treatments, including physical wounds; a harmful algae; and the Australian crustacean Cyclodius ungulatus, or hoof-clawed reef crab. For each treatment, they measured coral tissue loss over the course of a month as a proxy for coral health.
The team found that high water temperatures appeared to trigger tissue loss in the coral samples. However, the amount of tissue loss varied depending on the experimental treatment. For example, the presence of algae increased the probability of significant tissue loss by six-fold compared to treatments without algae. By contrast, crab tankmates decreased the risk of major tissue loss by more than 60% compared to treatments without crabs.
Surprisingly, crabs seemed particularly beneficial to the wounded corals, which experienced less tissue loss than either uninjured corals exposed to crabs or injured corals without a crab. What’s more, coral wounds rarely grew when crabs were present but, in some cases, appeared to expand in the absence of crabs.
To better understand the relationship between crabs and coral, the researchers conducted additional experiments on crab behavior. Lab studies suggested that crabs avoided living coral tissue, instead feeding in areas of recent tissue loss. Out on the reef, the team observed that wounded corals lost patches of algae faster than uninjured corals. The finding suggests that crabs and other organisms might remove the algae — in effect, pruning their habitat.
But why would crabs be attracted to coral wounds in the first place? Perhaps they’re lured by nutritious mucus that corals release when they’re injured, the authors suggested.
“Corals probably experience small wounds, like the ones we used in this study, relatively frequently from fish bites and physical abrasion. These wounds are probably not super detrimental, but they may be enough to release this mucus and attract coral-associated organisms, like C. ungulatus,” said Renzi, who is now pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of California Santa Barbara.
The team’s findings support an ecological concept that positives species interactions like mutualism may be particularly important under environmental stress and could potentially contribute to some species’ resilience against stressors.
“This work challenges a paradigm about corals,” said Brian Silliman, Rachel Carson Distinguished Professor of Marine Conservation Biology at the Nicholas School, who advised Renzi during her master’s work. “The temperature at which corals succumb to heat stress is generally thought to be innate and inflexible. But this work shows that an intricate biological partnership greatly increases the ability of corals to resist heat stress. The crabs don’t affect heat tolerance directly — rather, they appear to remove the stress of injury by cleaning coral wounds.”
The results also have implications for coral reef restoration strategies. For example, adding mutualistic crabs to new coral colonies could potentially minimize tissue loss from diseases associated with transplanting.
“We often think of the world as ‘dog-eat-dog’ and assume organisms are constantly competing against each other in effort to survive,” Renzi said. “But in cases like these, positive species interactions may be really important for survival. Evolutionarily, looking out for number 1 may also mean looking out for number 2.”
Funding: JJR was funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, Duke University and a Rhodes Data Expedition grant. LCG was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. BRS was supported by Duke RESTORE and Foundation for the Carolinas.
Citation: “An abundant mutualist can protect corals from multiple stressors.” Renzi, Julianna J. Renzi, Leo C. Gaskins. Juliana Hoehne-Diana, Brian R. Silliman, Proceedings Biological Sciences, Feb. 12, 2025. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2024.2936
The team documented crabs of the species Cyclodius ungulatus feeding along the margins of tissue loss in the branching coral species Acropora aspera. Video by Julianna Renzi
Journal
Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences
An abundant mutualist can protect corals from multiple stressors
Article Publication Date
25-Feb-2025
Novel cigarette pricing policy linked to decrease in sales in California city
A new study found that an Oakland, Calif. law requiring cigarette prices to increase to a minimum of $8 per pack led to a decline in sales, suggesting that these minimum floor price laws could complement tobacco taxation to reduce smoking rates.
A new study found that an Oakland, Calif. law requiring cigarette prices to increase to a minimum of $8 per pack led to a decline in sales, suggesting that these minimum floor price laws could complement tobacco taxation to reduce smoking rates.
Tobacco price policies, such as taxation, are effective public health strategies that have long shown to reduce tobacco use by raising the prices of cigarettes and other tobacco products. Minimum price floor laws (MPFL)—which set prices below which cigarettes can not be sold—are a somewhat newer fiscal tool that may also discourage tobacco use, according to a new study led by a Boston School of Public Health (BUSPH) researcher.
Published in the journal Tobacco Control, the study examined cigarette and cigar sales in Oakland, Calif., after the city implemented an $8 floor price per pack/package of cigarettes and cigars in 2020. The MFPL led to a 15-percent decrease in cigarette sales overall and a 25-percent decrease in sales of lower-priced cigarettes during the first 17 months of implementation.
Notably, the study also examined whether these MFPLs pushed consumers to purchase tobacco products in the neighboring areas outside of Oakland, but they did not observe any changes in tobacco sales in these areas, nor did they observe that consumers switched from cigarettes to e-cigarettes or vaping products.
“Our findings show that setting a minimum price on tobacco products can be an effective policy for reducing tobacco sales, especially in local jurisdictions that are preempted by state law from establishing an excise tax,” says study lead and corresponding author Dr. Justin White, associate professor of health law, policy & management at BUSPH.
MFPLs may be particularly effective at curbing tobacco initiation and prevalence because they increase the cost of lower-priced tobacco products, which may deter purchasing by price-sensitive groups—including youth and low-income individuals—who are disproportionately burdened by smoking and related morbidity and mortality. Smoking remains the leading cause of preventable disease and death in the United States, and individuals who do smoke typically begin during adolescence.
The study didn’t assess the effects of the MFPL policy on specific subgroups of the population, but the findings suggest that low-income people would have also benefited from this policy.
“Lower-income people also benefit disproportionately from these policies,” says Dr. White. “Because lower-income people tend to smoke more than higher-income people, they are more likely to cut back on smoking as a result of the policy. They benefit in terms of improved health, more savings on money they’d been spending on tobacco, and more healthcare cost savings from being less sick later in life.”
For the study, Dr. White and colleagues from the University of California, San Francisco utilized retail scanner data to assess spending habits for cigarettes and cigars at more than 3,500 stores in and around Oakland, as well as the rest of California between August 2020 and December 2021.
Nearly all retail stores complied with the MFPL requirements for cigarette sales, while only seven percent complied for cigar sales. Along with various limitations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many retailers reportedly had difficulty stocking cigar products that met a minimum pack size requirement that was enacted at the same time—resulting in lax enforcement of the MFPL by Oakland’s public health officials.
“Ultimately, lack of compliance for cigars meant that cigar prices did not go up as a result of the floor price policy,” says Dr. White. “Policy enforcement is a critical component for having public health policies work as intended."
The researchers also noted that smoking cessation products did not increase after the MFPL policy went into effect, which suggests that cessation promotion needs to be better integrated into tobacco policies.
“We know that recommended approaches such as nicotine replacement therapy or prescription medications can increase smoking cessation, but only about one-third of people trying to quit use one of these approaches,” Dr. White says. “We need to make it easier for individuals to access evidence-based approaches, and there may be opportunities to use digital technology like smartphone apps and text-messaging programs to deliver timely support.”
The study was coauthored by Serge Atherwood, research data analyst at UCSF, and Dr. Dorie Apollonio, professor in the Department of Clinical Pharmacy at the UCSF School of Pharmacy.
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About Boston University School of Public Health
Founded in 1976, Boston University School of Public Health is one of the top ten ranked schools of public health in the world. It offers master's- and doctoral-level education in public health. The faculty in six departments conduct policy-changing public health research around the world, with the mission of improving the health of populations—especially the disadvantaged, underserved, and vulnerable—locally and globally.
