Re-drawing the Maps for Endemic Mycoses Ashraf, Nida; Kubat, Ryan C.; Poplin, Victoria ...
Mycopathologia (1975),
10/2020, Letnik:
185, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Endemic mycoses such as histoplasmosis, coccidioidomycosis, blastomycosis, paracoccidioidomycosis, and talaromycosis are well-known causes of focal and systemic disease within specific geographic ...areas of known endemicity. However, over the past few decades, there have been increasingly frequent reports of infections due to endemic fungi in areas previously thought to be “non-endemic.” There are numerous potential reasons for this shift such as increased use of immune suppressive medications, improved diagnostic tests, increased disease recognition, and global factors such as migration, increased travel, and climate change. Regardless of the causes, it has become evident that our previous understanding of endemic regions for these fungal diseases needs to evolve. The epidemiology of the newly described
Emergomyces
is incomplete; our understanding of it continues to evolve. This review will focus on the evidence underlying the established areas of endemicity for these mycoses as well as new data and reports from medical literature that support the re-thinking these geographic boundaries. Updating the endemic fungi maps would inform clinical practice and global surveillance of these diseases.
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. This volume brings together an international team of contributors to provide a much-needed examination of climate litigation in Africa. ...The book outlines how climate litigation in Africa is distinct as well as pinpointing where it connects with the global conversation. Chapters engage with crucial themes such as human rights approaches to climate governance, corporate liability and the role of gender in climate litigation.
Flood hazards are common in Bhutan as a result of torrential rainfall. Historical flooding events also point to flooding during the main monsoon season of the year, which has had a huge impact in ...many parts of the country. To account for climate change patterns in flood hazards in Bhutan, 116 historical flood events between 1968 and 2020 for 20 districts were retrieved and reviewed. The preliminary review revealed that the frequency of flood occurrence has increased by three times in recent years. In this study, seven flood vulnerability (FV) indicators were considered. Five are the attributes of historical floods, classified into a number of incidents for flood events, fatalities, affected population, and infrastructure damages including economic losses. Additionally, the highest annual rainfall and existence of a flood map were other two indicators considered. Using historical data, flood hazard and impact zonation were performed. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) method was employed to derive a multi-criteria decision model. This resulted in priority ranking of the seven FV indicators, broadly classified into social, physical/economic, and environmental. Thereafter, an indicator-based weighted method was used to develop the district flood vulnerability index (DFVI) map of Bhutan. The DFVI map should help researchers understand the flood vulnerability scenarios in Bhutan and use these to mediate flood hazard and risk management. According to the study, FVI is very high in Chhukha, Punakha, Sarpang, and Trashigang districts, and the index ranges between 0.75 to 1.0.
Thirty years ago, half the developing world lived in extreme poverty today, a quarter. Now, a much smaller share of children are malnourished and at risk of early death. And access to modern ...infrastructure is much more widespread. Critical to the progress: rapid economic growth driven by technological innovation and institutional reform, particularly in today's middle- income countries, where per capita incomes have doubled. Yet the needs remain enormous, with the number of hungry people having passed the billion marks this year for the first time in history. With so many still in poverty and hunger, growth and poverty alleviation remain the overarching priority for developing countries. Climate change only makes the challenge more complicated. First, the impacts of a changing climate are already being felt, with more droughts, more floods, more strong storms, and more heat waves- taxing individuals, firms, and governments, drawing resources away from development. Second, continuing climate change, at current rates, will pose increasingly severe challenges to development. By century's end, it could lead to warming of 5°C or more compared with preindustrial times and to a vastly different world from today, with more extreme weather events, most ecosystems stressed and changing, many species doomed to extinction, and whole island nations threatened by inundation. Even our best efforts are unlikely to stabilize temperatures at anything less than 2°C above preindustrial temperatures, warming that will require substantial adaptation. High income countries can and must reduce their carbon footprints. They cannot continue to fill up an unfair and unsustainable share of the atmospheric commons. But developing countries whose average per capita emissions are a third those of high income countries need massive expansions in energy, transport, urban systems, and agricultural production. If pursued using traditional technologies and carbon intensities, these much-needed expansions will produce more greenhouse gases and, hence, more climate change. The question, then, is not just how to make development more resilient to climate change. It is how to pursue growth and prosperity without causing "dangerous" climate change.
Drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are necessary to successfully mitigate climate change. Individual environmental behavior is central to this change. Given that environmental behavior ...necessitates 1) effortful individual self-control and 2) cooperation by others, public policy may constitute an attractive instrument for regulating one's own as well as others' environmental behavior. Framing climate change mitigation as a cooperative self-control problem, we explore the incremental predictive power of self-control and beliefs surrounding others' cooperation beyond established predictors of policy support in study 1 using machine-learning (N = 610). In study 2, we systematically test and confirm the effects of self-control and beliefs surrounding others' cooperation (N = 270). Both studies showed that personal importance of climate change mitigation and perceived insufficiency of others' environmental behavior predict policy support, while there was no strong evidence for a negative association between own-self control success and policy support. These results emerge beyond the effects of established predictors, such as environmental attitudes and beliefs, risk perception (study 1), and social norms (study 2). Results are discussed in terms of leveraging policy as a behavioral enactment constraint to control others' but not own environmental behavior.
Ethiopia is frequently identified as a country that is highly vulnerable to climate variability and change. The study was aimed to examine agro-ecological based smallholder farmers' livelihood ...vulnerability to climate variability and change in Oromo Nationality Administration (ONA), North East Ethiopia. Data were collected from a survey of 335 sampled households, focus group discussion, and interview from three different agro-ecologies in the study area and secondary sources. Count, percentage, mean, standard deviation, Chi-square test (test of independence), ANOVA, Livelihood Vulnerability Index (LVI) and LVI-IPCC were used for analysis. LVI and LVI-IPCC results revealed that Kolla is the most vulnerable (0.18) because of its highest exposure (0.74) and sensitivity (0.71) values and lowest adaptive capacity (0.49) while Daga is least vulnerable (0.08) because of its lowest exposure (0.61) and sensitivity (0.42). Overall, results suggest that the two methods resulted in similar degrees of vulnerability and identified Kolla agro-ecological zone as the most vulnerable while the Dega agro-ecological zone is the least vulnerable of the three agro-ecological zones. The researchers conclude that development strategies and plans should be prepared considering local-specific issues and/or situation.
This bibliometric study of a large publication set dealing with research on climate change aims at mapping the relevant literature from a bibliometric perspective and presents a multitude of ...quantitative data: (1) The growth of the overall publication output as well as (2) of some major subfields, (3) the contributing journals and countries as well as their citation impact, and (4) a title word analysis aiming to illustrate the time evolution and relative importance of specific research topics. The study is based on 222,060 papers (articles and reviews only) published between 1980 and 2014. The total number of papers shows a strong increase with a doubling every 5-6 years. Continental biomass related research is the major subfield, closely followed by climate modeling. Research dealing with adaptation, mitigation, risks, and vulnerability of global warming is comparatively small, but their share of papers increased exponentially since 2005. Research on vulnerability and on adaptation published the largest proportion of very important papers (in terms of citation impact). Climate change research has become an issue also for disciplines beyond the natural sciences. The categories Engineering and Social Sciences show the strongest field-specific relative increase. The Journal of Geophysical Research, the Journal of Climate, the Geophysical Research Letters, and Climatic Change appear at the top positions in terms of the total number of papers published. Research on climate change is quantitatively dominated by the USA, followed by the UK, Germany, and Canada. The citation-based indicators exhibit consistently that the UK has produced the largest proportion of high impact papers compared to the other countries (having published more than 10,000 papers). Also, Switzerland, Denmark and also The Netherlands (with a publication output between around 3,000 and 6,000 papers) perform top-the impact of their contributions is on a high level. The title word analysis shows that the term climate change comes forward with time. Furthermore, the term impact arises and points to research dealing with the various effects of climate change. The discussion of the question of human induced climate change towards a clear fact (for the majority of the scientific community) stimulated research on future pathways for adaptation and mitigation. Finally, the term model and related terms prominently appear independent of time, indicating the high relevance of climate modeling.
Forecasting the impacts of climate change on Aedes-borne viruses-especially dengue, chikungunya, and Zika-is a key component of public health preparedness. We apply an empirically parameterized model ...of viral transmission by the vectors Aedes aegypti and Ae. albopictus, as a function of temperature, to predict cumulative monthly global transmission risk in current climates, and compare them with projected risk in 2050 and 2080 based on general circulation models (GCMs). Our results show that if mosquito range shifts track optimal temperature ranges for transmission (21.3-34.0°C for Ae. aegypti; 19.9-29.4°C for Ae. albopictus), we can expect poleward shifts in Aedes-borne virus distributions. However, the differing thermal niches of the two vectors produce different patterns of shifts under climate change. More severe climate change scenarios produce larger population exposures to transmission by Ae. aegypti, but not by Ae. albopictus in the most extreme cases. Climate-driven risk of transmission from both mosquitoes will increase substantially, even in the short term, for most of Europe. In contrast, significant reductions in climate suitability are expected for Ae. albopictus, most noticeably in southeast Asia and west Africa. Within the next century, nearly a billion people are threatened with new exposure to virus transmission by both Aedes spp. in the worst-case scenario. As major net losses in year-round transmission risk are predicted for Ae. albopictus, we project a global shift towards more seasonal risk across regions. Many other complicating factors (like mosquito range limits and viral evolution) exist, but overall our results indicate that while climate change will lead to increased net and new exposures to Aedes-borne viruses, the most extreme increases in Ae. albopictus transmission are predicted to occur at intermediate climate change scenarios.
Key message Using the whole genome and growth data of Arabidopsis thaliana ecotypes, we identified two genes associated with enhancement of the growth rate in response to elevated CO.sub.2 ...conditions. Improving plant growth under elevated CO.sub.2 conditions may contribute to enhanced agricultural yield under future global climate change. In this study, we examined the genes implicated in the enhancement of growth rates under elevated CO.sub.2 conditions by analyzing the growth rates of Arabidopsis thaliana ecotypes originating from various latitudes and altitudes throughout the world. We also performed a genome-wide association study and a transcriptome study to identify single nucleic polymorphisms that were correlated with the relative growth rate (RGR) under elevated CO.sub.2 conditions or with CO.sub.2 response of RGR. We then selected 43 candidate genes and generated their overexpression and/or RNA interference (RNAi) transgenic mutants for screening. After screening, we have found that RNAi lines of AT3G4000 and AT5G50900 showed significantly higher growth rates under the elevated CO.sub.2 condition. As per our findings, we conclude that natural variation includes genetic variation associated with the enhancement of plant productivity under elevated CO.sub.2 conditions.
The sedimentary laminae of Tamarix cones in arid regions are of great significance for dating and climatic reconstruction. Here, we present a multiproxy climatic record from the Tamarix cones in the ...southern margin of the Taklimakan Desert. Both the bivariate analysis and canonical correlation analysis were carried out for four groups of climate proxies in Tamarix cones, including organic matter content, grain size, cation content, and stable isotope content (δsup.13C, and δsup.18O). The temperature during the period from 1790 to 2010 AD has been reconstructed using the support vector machine optimized by the grey wolf optimizer, in which the climate proxies (TN, TOC, C/N, Mgsup.2+, Casup.2+, δsup.13C, and δsup.18O) were selected using the neighborhood rough set. The reconstructed values are in good agreement with the instrumental data. The regional temperature has distinct stages during the period from 1790 to 2010 AD, with cold conditions during 1790–1840 AD and 1896–1939 AD, and with warm conditions during 1841–1895 AD and 1940–2010 AD. The present work is beneficial to predict the future climate in the local area and encourage local governments to develop more effective measures to address the risks of climate change to environmental sustainability.
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