- Robert Pattinson worries he’s going to spend a ‘vast majority’ of his life ‘unemployed and desperate’ Yahoo Entertainment
- Robert Pattinson reveals his ‘deep, deep’ fear of humiliation when choosing movie roles WION
- ‘I have a deep, deep fear of humiliation’: Robert Pattinson opens up about his overwhelming fear while taking movie roles PINKVILLA
- Robert Pattinson’s Worst Fear Is Being Humiliated Onscreen: “You’re The One Who Everyone’s Going To Say Is Lame” The Playlist
- Robert Pattinson Says He Has a “Deep, Deep Fear of Humiliation” When Taking on Movie Roles Hollywood Reporter
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Tag Archives: Vast
‘How else can we help you?’ Jurors hear and see Madigan’s vast patronage system inside ComEd – Chicago Sun-Times
- ‘How else can we help you?’ Jurors hear and see Madigan’s vast patronage system inside ComEd Chicago Sun-Times
- ComEd bribery trial: Key witness told to not ‘put anything in writing’ by Madigan associate WGN News
- Star Witness Takes the Stand in ComEd Trial, Testifies About Efforts to Influence Michael Madigan WTTW News
- ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it with those guys’: Jurors see undercover videos of Michael Madigan associates in ‘ComEd Four’ trial Chicago Tribune
- ComEd bribery trial: Key witness told to not ‘put anything in writing’ by Madigan associate WGN TV Chicago
- View Full Coverage on Google News
China’s vast countryside in rush to bolster COVID defences
SHANGHAI/BEIJING, Dec 29 (Reuters) – China’s sprawling and thinly resourced countryside is racing to beef up medical facilities before hundreds of millions of factory workers return to their families for the Lunar New Year holiday next month from cities where COVID-19 is surging.
Having imposed the world’s strictest COVID regime of lockdowns and relentless testing for three years, China reversed course this month towards living with the virus, leaving its fragile health system overwhelmed.
The lifting of restrictions, following widespread protests against them, means COVID is spreading largely unchecked and likely infecting millions of people a day, according to some international health experts.
China officially reported one new COVID death for Wednesday, down from three on Tuesday, but foreign governments and many epidemiologists believe the numbers are much higher, and that more than 1 million people may die next year.
China has said it only counts deaths of COVID patients caused by pneumonia and respiratory failure as COVID-related.
In the southwestern city of Chengdu, funeral parlours were busy after dark on Wednesday, with a steady stream of cars entering one, which was heavily guarded by security personnel.
One van driver working for the parlour said the past few weeks have been particularly busy and that “huge numbers of people” were inside.
Hospitals and funeral homes in major cities have been under intense pressure, but the main concern over the health system’s ability to cope with surging infections is focused on the countryside.
At a Shanghai pharmacy, Wang Kaiyun, 53, a cleaner in the city who comes from the neighbouring Anhui province, said she was buying medicines for her family back home.
“My husband, my son, my grandson, my mother, they are all infected,” she said. “They can’t get any medicine, nothing for fever or cough.”
Each year, hundreds of millions of people, mostly working in factories near the southern and eastern coasts, return to the countryside for the Lunar New Year, due to start on Jan. 22.
The holiday travel rush is expected to last for 40 days, from Jan. 7 to Feb. 15, authorities said.
The state-run China Daily reported on Thursday that rural regions across China were beefing up their medical treatment capacities.
It said a hospital in a rural part of Inner Mongolia where more than 100,000 people live was seeking bidders for a 1.9 million yuan ($272,308) contract to upgrade its wards into intensive care units.
Liancheng County Central Hospital in the eastern Fujian province was seeking tenders for ambulances and medical devices, ranging from breathing machines to electrocardiogram monitors.
In December, tenders put out by hospitals for key medical equipment were two-to-three times higher than in previous months, according to a Reuters review，suggesting hospitals across the country were scrambling to plug shortages.
TESTING REQUIREMENTS
The world’s second-largest economy is expected to suffer a slowdown in factory output and domestic consumption in the near term as workers and shoppers fall ill.
The contact-intensive services sector, which accounts for roughly half of China’s economic output, was hammered by the country’s anti-virus curbs, which shut down many restaurants and restricted travel. As China re-opens, many businesses in the services industry have no money to expand.
The re-opening also raises the prospect of Chinese tourists returning to shopping streets around the world, once a market worth $255 billion a year globally. But some countries have been taken aback by the scale of the outbreak and are sceptical of Beijing’s COVID statistics.
China’s official death toll of 5,246 since the pandemic began compares with more than 1 million deaths in the United States. Chinese-ruled Hong Kong has reported more than 11,000 deaths.
The United States, India, Italy, Japan and Taiwan said they would require COVID tests for travellers from China. Britain was considering a similar move, the Telegraph reported.
The United States issued a travel alert on Wednesday advising Americans to “reconsider travel to China, Hong Kong, and Macau” and citing “reports that the healthcare system is overwhelmed” along with the risk of new variants.
The main airport in the Italian city of Milan started testing passengers arriving from Beijing and Shanghai on Dec. 26 and found that almost half of them were infected.
China has rejected criticism of its statistics as groundless and politically motivated attempts to smear its policies. It has also played down the risk of new variants, saying it expects mutations to be more virulent but less severe.
Omicron was still the dominant strain in China, Chinese health officials said this week.
Australia, Germany, Thailand and others said they would not impose additional restrictions on travel for now.
For its part, China, whose borders have been all but shut to foreigners since early 2020, will stop requiring inbound travellers to go into quarantine from Jan. 8.
($1 = 6.9774 yuan)
Additional reporting by Martin Quin Pollard in Chengdu; Writing by Marius Zaharia; Editing by Lincoln Feast, Robert Birsel
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
NWSL investigation finds misconduct at ‘vast majority’ of clubs
The investigation is the second prominent probe into abuses across the women’s soccer world, this one at the behest of the NWSL and the players’ union. The 125-page report, issued Wednesday, included a new account of abuse involving Paul Riley, the former Portland Thorns’ coach, and previously unreported details on the firing of former NY/NJ Gotham FC general manager Alyse LaHue and the suspension of Houston Dash coach and general manager James Clarkson.
Similar to a report conducted by U.S. Soccer, which was released in October, the NWSL investigation details misconduct by Riley; Rory Dames, the former coach of the Chicago Red Stars; and Christy Holly, the former Louisville Racing coach. But the NWSL report also highlights a half-dozen other coaches and focuses on the missteps and mismanagement of the league’s teams and team owners, including the conduct of eight teams that ignored or mishandled complaints and warning signs of abuse.
“This report clearly reflects how our league systemically failed to protect our players,” NWSL Commissioner Jessica Berman said in a statement Wednesday. “On behalf of the Board and the league, let me first and foremost sincerely apologize to our players for those failures and missteps. They deserve, at a minimum, a safe and secure environment to participate at the highest level in a sport they love, and they have my unwavering commitment that delivering that change will remain a priority each and every day.”
In addition to instances of sexual abuse and manipulation, which have been revealed in previous media reports and the U.S. Soccer probe, the NWSL’s investigation found that “staff in positions of power made inappropriate sexual remarks to players, mocked players’ bodies, pressured players to lose unhealthy amounts of weight, crossed professional boundaries with players, and created volatile and manipulative working conditions. They used derogatory and insulting language towards players, displayed insensitivity towards players’ mental health, and engaged in retaliation against players who attempted to report or did report concerns.”
According to the new report, “misconduct against players has occurred at the vast majority of NWSL clubs at various times from the earliest years of the League to the present.”
“Players were frequently reminded of the fragility and financial instability of the League. From the early days of the League, they were told to be grateful, loyal, and acquiescent, even as they were not afforded the resources or respect due to professional athletes,” the report states. “Players told the Joint Investigative Team that this environment dissuaded them from reporting misconduct. Compounding this effect, the League lacked trainings, policies, and other resources on harassment, abuse, and other forms of misconduct.”
The report was a product of a joint investigation conducted by two law firms: Covington & Burling, on behalf of the league, and Weil, Gotshal & Manges, hired by the NWSL Players Association. Investigators reviewed 200,000 documents and interviewed around 100 current and former NWSL players, in addition to 90 current and former club employees.
The probe was launched in October, shortly after The Washington Post and the Athletic reported allegations of abuse at several clubs, prompting players to demand action from the sport’s stakeholders. U.S. Soccer hired Sally Q. Yates, the former acting attorney general, to conduct a separate investigation around the same time. In the wake of that report, Portland Thorns’ owner Merritt Paulson announced that he was selling the club, team administrators were fired and coach Rhian Wilkinson resigned. Chicago Red Stars owner Arnim Whisler surrendered day-to-day control and earlier this month announced that he was selling the team. In all, eight of the league’s 10 coaches have lost their jobs, and NWSL Commissioner Lisa Baird resigned.
The NWSL report details many of the same abuses, fleshing out some details and analyzing why misconduct was allowed persist. Many instances involved authority figures who failed players — and in some cases were at the heart of the problem.
LaHue, Gotham’s general manager from 2019-21, “made unwanted sexual advances toward a player,” according to the report, sending inappropriate text messages, questioning the player’s interactions with others and pressing the player for more attention. She sent the player text messages that read, “You were in my dream last night. Getting a massage,” and “I don’t see us as friends.”
The club fired LaHue last July. According to the report, LaHue denied the allegations. Her attorney did not immediately return a message seeking comment Wednesday.
The NWSL didn’t wait to act on investigators’ findings, the report says. Orlando Pride coaches Amanda Cromwell and Sam Greene were fired in October for retaliating against players; Houston’s Clarkson was suspended.
According to the NWSL report, Clarkson “communicated with players in a manner that created anxiety and fear for multiple players.”
“In one instance, Clarkson suspected that players had been drinking alcohol the night before a game, so he convened the players and reprimanded them in a manner that left multiple players feeling scared and attacked,” the report states. Clarkson was suspended in April, and the club at the time said a final decision on his status would be made at the conclusion of the NWSL investigation.
Shortly after the report was released Wednesday, the Dash announced that it would not be renewing Clarkson’s contract, which is set to expire at the end of the month. “We apologize to players, present and former, who were subject to misconduct by James Clarkson,” the team said in a statement. “…Our vision of building and maintaining a culture of excellence on and off the pitch starts with cultivating a respectful and healthy working environment.”
Across the league, the report found a deep-seated culture in which players didn’t feel empowered to report complaints and boundary lines between players and coaches were often blurred.
“Players from marginalized backgrounds, or with the least job security, were often targets of misconduct,” the report states. “At the same time, these players faced the greatest barriers to speaking out about or obtaining redress for what they experienced.”
The report details for the first time the experience of Kaleigh Kurtz, who played for Riley with the North Carolina Courage. She told investigators she didn’t initially report Riley’s behavior out of fear of being called a “troublemaker.” The report describes manipulative and volatile behavior from Riley, and Kurtz told investigators she felt she was being groomed for sexual abuse.
At one point, Riley demanded Kurtz lose 14 pounds to retain her starting position, telling her, “I hope you know I’m doing this because I love you.” Kurtz requested a trade, which the team failed to execute. Riley was fired by the Courage in September 2021, after the Athletic reported on abuse allegations that stemmed from his time coaching in Portland, which he has denied. He did not meet with NWSL investigators and was not immediately available for comment Wednesday.
The NWSL report spreads blame to U.S. Soccer. Coach misconduct was “inadequately investigated or addressed,” it says, and coaches were allowed to pursue new jobs across the league even after complaints had been substantiated.
“Leaders from U.S. Soccer avoided taking responsibility for systemic failures to protect players, contending that decision-making authority and the responsibility to address misconduct lay with the NWSL and club owners,” the report says.
U.S. Soccer has embarked on a series of reforms in the wake of the Yates’ report.
“It’s been over two months since the release of the Yates’ report, and we’ve already seen it have big impacts across our game,” U.S. Soccer President Cindy Parlow Cone said this week. “As challenging as it is to read the report, the report has and we will continue to make our sport better. Participant safety is our top priority, and the Yates’ report gave us a road map to make the changes that we are now working diligently on.”
The organization intends to publicly share its action plan to implement Yates’s recommendations by Jan. 31. It has hired Mana Shim to chair a player safety task force. Shim was among the first players to speak publicly about abuse and misconduct, which she experienced while playing for Riley in Portland, and she now has a key role in crafting the policies that will help current and future players.
“We’re making progress,” she said this week. “…I feel empowered and excited about what we’re doing.”
While many of the coaches cited in the two investigations are no longer working in the league, the NWSL report makes a series of wide-reaching recommendations for league officials. They include revising the anti-harassment policy; establishing clear guidelines for appropriate meeting places; consider guidelines for supervisors socializing with players; provide written guidance that makes clear comments and jokes about a player’s weight are unacceptable; requiring separate housing accommodations for players and club staff; and mandatory training covering anti-bullying, anti-harassment and anti-racism.
“This will be an ongoing process of improving and strengthening our league,” said the NWSL’s Berman.
Vast volcanic eruptions may have turned Venus into hell
Massive global volcanism that covered 80% of Venus’ surface in lava may have been the deciding factor that transformed Venus from a wet and mild world into the suffocating, sulfuric, hellish planet that it is today.
The surface temperature on Venus is a sweltering 867 degrees Fahrenheit (464 degrees Celsius), hot enough to melt lead, and there’s a crushing pressure of 90 atmospheres underneath the dense clouds of carbon dioxide laced with corroding sulfuric acid. Often decried as Earth‘s “evil twin,” Venus is a victim of a runaway greenhouse effect, no doubt amplified by Venus being about 25 million miles (40 million kilometers) closer to the sun than Earth and therefore receiving more heat.
Yet, there’s growing evidence that Venus wasn’t always this way, and could have once been a temperate world somewhat similar to Earth — perhaps more recently, in geological terms, than expected.
Related: NASA’s Parker Solar Probe captures stunning Venus photo during close flyby
Michael Way, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, has led much of the research developing this new vision of Venus. In their latest paper, he and his team argue that Venus’ volcanism could have ultimately been what pushed the planet over the edge by sending vast amounts of carbon dioxide — as we know, a potent greenhouse gas — billowing into Venus’ atmosphere.
In the 1990s, NASA’s Magellan spacecraft radar-mapped the surface of Venus, which is otherwise obscured by the planet’s dense atmosphere, and found that much of the surface was covered in volcanic basalt rock. Such “large igneous provinces” are the result of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of massive volcanism that occurred at some point in the past billion years.
In particular, several of these events coming in the space of a million years, perhaps, and each covering hundreds of thousands of square miles or kilometers in lava, could have endowed Venus’ atmosphere with so much carbon dioxide that the climate would have been unable to cope. Any oceans would have boiled away, adding moisture to the atmosphere, and because water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, accelerating the runaway greenhouse effect. Over time, the water would have been lost to space, but the carbon dioxide, and the inhospitable world, remained.
“While we’re not yet sure how often the events which created these fields occurred, we should be able to narrow it down by studying Earth’s own history,” Way said in a statement.
The frequency with which massive volcanic events forming large igneous provinces have occurred on Earth implies that it is likely that several such events could have occurred on Venus within a million years. These incidents could have scarred Venus forever.
Earth itself has had some close calls. So-called “super-volcanoes” have been connected to numerous mass-extinction events on Earth over the past half-a-billion years. For example, the Late Devonian era mass extinction 370 million years ago has been attributed by some to super-volcanism in what is now Russia and Siberia, as well as to a separate super-volcanic eruption in Australia. The Triassic–Jurassic mass extinction is widely blamed on the formation of the biggest of Earth’s large igneous provinces, the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province, 200 million years ago. Even the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago may have been caused by the double whammy of an asteroid strike and super-volcanism in the Deccan Traps, a large igneous province in India.
For unknown reasons, similar volcanic events on Venus were much more widespread and instigated a runaway greenhouse effect that transformed the planet. Meanwhile on Earth, the carbon-silicate cycle that acts as the planet’s natural thermostat, exchanging carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases between the mantle and the atmosphere over millions of years, was able to prevent Earth from following the same path as Venus.
Two future NASA missions will endeavor to answer some of these questions. DAVINCI, the Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble Gases, Chemistry and Imaging mission will launch later this decade, to be followed by VERITAS, the Venus Emissivity, Radio Science, InSAR, Topography and Spectroscopy mission in the early 2030s. The European Space Agency’s EnVision mission also targets launch sometime in the 2030s, while China has proposed a possible mission called VOICE, the Venus Volcano Imaging and Climate Explorer, that if launched would reach Venus in 2027 to study the planet’s atmosphere and geology.
“A primary goal of DAVINCI is to narrow down the history of water on Venus and when it may have disappeared, providing more insight into how Venus’ climate has changed over time,” Way said.
The findings were published in the Planetary Science Journal earlier this year.
Follow Keith Cooper on Twitter @21stCenturySETI. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.
Fearing COVID, workers flee from Foxconn’s vast Chinese iPhone plant
BEIJING, Oct 31 (Reuters) – After enduring days of lock-in at Foxconn’s vast facility in central China with 200,000 other workers, Yuan finally climbed the fences on Saturday night and escaped the complex, joining others fleeing what they feared was a widening COVID outbreak.
He walked through the night, keeping to a northerly route, towards his hometown of Hebi, every step taking him farther away from iPhone maker Foxconn’s (2317.TW) Zhengzhou plant, the Taiwan-based group’s largest in mainland China.
“There were so many people on the road,” Yuan told Reuters on Monday, declining to give his full name because of the matter’s sensitivity.
Since mid-October, Foxconn has been wrestling with a COVID-19 outbreak at its facility in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province in central China. Workers were locked in to stop the spread of the coronavirus to the outside word. Foxconn has repeatedly refrained from disclosing the case load.
“We were shut in on Oct. 14, and we had to do endless PCR tests, and after about 10 days, we had to wear N95 masks, and were given traditional Chinese medicine,” said Yuan.
Whenever a positive or suspected case was found at a production line, there would be a public broadcast, but work would continue, he told Reuters.
“People would be called away in the middle of work, and if they don’t show up the next day, that would mean they had been taken away,” Yuan said.
Around 20,000 workers had been put in quarantine on-site, Yuan had heard, but he could not be sure how many were infected, as management did not publicise that information.
China typically isolates vast numbers of people considered close or even potential contacts of an infected person.
The world’s second-largest economy continues to wage war on COVID with disruptive lockdowns, mass testing and quarantines while many other countries have chosen to live with the disease. read more
For companies with massive manufacturing campuses like Foxconn, that has meant keeping thousands of workers on-site in so-called “closed-loop” systems to keep their production lines running.
“Food for tens of thousands was merely left outside (of the quarantine buildings at the plant),” said a worker surnamed Li, 21.
Li, who is still at the plant, said she was planning to quit.
In a statement on Monday, Apple (AAPL.O) supplier Foxconn said that reports that 20,000 staff had been diagnosed with COVID were false.
On Sunday afternoon, the company told Reuters in an emailed statement that workers were allowed to leave if they chose to. read more
Foxconn did not immediately respond to a Reuters request on Monday for further comment.
‘NEVER GO BACK’
Disruptions from China’s zero-COVID policies to commerce and industry have widened in October as cases escalated. Apart from the Foxconn lockdown, the Shanghai Disney Resort was shut from Monday to comply with counter-epidemic requirements, with visitors still inside.
For Yuan, matters came to a head when he heard that a housing complex for workers near his plant had been cordoned off by security on Friday, and that the plant itself was to go under a curfew the next day.
In a panic, Yuan decided to leave the next day, joining streams of other escaping workers. It was not immediately clear if a curfew was eventually imposed.
By Sunday morning, Yuan had hiked to the banks of the Yellow River, the northern boundary of Zhengzhou, where he was stopped 50 km (30 miles) short of Hebi by authorities from the city of Xinxiang on the other side.
“I’ll never go back to Foxconn,” said Yuan, who has since been transported to Hebi and put under quarantine.
“Zhengzhou has put a chill in my heart.”
Reporting by Ryan Woo; Additional reporting by Beijing newsroom and Ziyi Tang; Editing by Christian Schmollinger
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Climate Change could make parts of drought-prone California a “vast inland sea” due to megafloods, study shows
It’s not an earthquake. And it isn’t the mega drought. It’s actually the exact opposite.
A megaflood.
Daniel Swain, a climate scientist with UCLA and a researcher involved in the study, describes a megaflood as, “a very severe flood event across a broad region that has the potential to bring catastrophic impacts to society in the areas affected.” He said a megaflood is similar to the 1,000-year flash flood events seen this summer in the St. Louis area and Kentucky, but across a much wider area, such as the entire state of California.
These massive floods, which experts say would turn California’s lowlands into a “vast inland sea,” might have previously happened once in a lifetime in the state. But experts say climate change is increasing the likelihood of these catastrophic disasters, causing them to occur more like every 25 to 50 years.
Climate change supercharges heavy rain events, making flash floods occur more regularly, as has been noted several times this summer in Eastern Kentucky, St. Louis, and even in California’s Death Valley National Park.
California is prone to these floods from atmospheric rivers naturally, and major floods from them have happened before — but climate change is upping the ante, and millions of people could be impacted.
The study said atmospheric rivers could become consecutive for weeks on end, like seen in this animation. Xingying Huang, one of the authors of the study, made this loop, which illustrates the water vapor transportation and potential precipitation accumulation at selected time slices during the 30-day scenario.
The area with the most destruction would be the Central Valley of California, including Sacramento, Fresno and Bakersfield, the study’s authors project. The Central Valley, roughly the size of Vermont and Massachusetts combined, produces a quarter of the nation’s food supply, according to the US Geological Survey.
A flood with the size to fill this valley has the potential to be the most expensive geophysical disaster to date, costing upwards of $1 trillion in losses and devastating the state’s lowland areas, including Los Angeles and Orange counties, according to the study.
That would be more 5 times the cost of Hurricane Katrina, the current costliest disaster in US history.
“Such a flood event in modern California would likely exceed the damages from a large magnitude earthquake by a considerable margin,” the study showed.
This study is the first phase of a three-part series studying the effects of a future megaflood event in California. The next two phases are expected to be released in two to three years.
“Ultimately, one of our goals is not just to understand these events scientifically, but it’s also to help California prepare for them,” Swain said. “It’s a question of when rather than if (the megaflood) occurs.”
It’s happened before. It will happen again, but worse, warns scientists
Over 150 years ago, a strong series of atmospheric rivers drenched the Golden State, causing one of the most exceptional floods in history following a dry spell that had left the West parched for decades.
Communities were demolished in minutes.
It was the winter of 1861-1862 and a historic megaflood transformed the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys into a “temporary but vast inland sea,” according to the study. Some areas had up to 30 feet of water for weeks, obliterating infrastructure, farmland, and towns.
Sacramento, the new state capital at the time, was under ten feet of debris-filled water for months.
The catastrophe began in December 1861, when nearly 15 feet of snow fell in the Sierra Nevada. Repetitive atmospheric rivers dropped warm rain for 43 days thereafter, dumping water down the mountainous slopes and into the valleys.
Four thousand people lost their lives, one-third of the state’s property was destroyed, a quarter of California’s cattle population drowned or starved, and one in eight homes were a complete loss by floodwaters.
In addition, one-fourth of California’s economy was obliterated, resulting in a state-wide bankruptcy.
Swain warns a megaflood like this will happen again, but worse and more frequent.
“We find that climate change has already increased the risk of a (1862) megaflood scenario in California, but that future climate warming will likely bring about even sharper risk increases,” the study warns.
Many of today’s major cities with millions of residents are built directly on top of the ancient flood deposits, Swain added, putting far more people in harm’s way.
About 500,000 people lived in California in 1862. Now, the state’s population is over 39 million.
“When this (flood) occurs again, the consequences would be wildly different than they were back in the 1860s,” Swain said.
Climate change increases the amount of rain the atmosphere can hold and causes more water in the air to fall as rain, which can lead to immediate flooding. Both are and will continue to occur in California.
The new study shows a rapid increase in the likelihood of week-long, recurring strong-to-extreme atmospheric rivers during the cool season. An atmospheric river is a long, narrow region of heavy moisture in the atmosphere that can transport moisture thousands of miles, like a fire hose in the sky. They usually bring beneficial rainfall to drought-prone regions like California but could quickly become hazardous with a warming climate.
Historically these winter atmospheric rivers dump feet of snow in the Sierra Nevada, but as climate warms, more of the snow will fall as rain. Instead of melting slowly over time, it all runs off, piles up, and floods immediately.
With a neighbor like the Pacific Ocean, California has “an infinite reservoir of water vapor offshore,” Swain added.
California’s mountainous terrain and wildfire risk make it especially vulnerable to flooding. Lingering burn scars from wildfires can create a steep, slick surface for water and debris to flow off. With wildfires becoming larger and burning more area thanks to climate change, more areas are susceptible to these debris flows.
Although models show this megaflood is inevitable, experts say there are ways to mitigate excessive loss.
“I think the extent of (megaflood) losses can be significantly reduced by doing certain sorts of things to revamp our flood management and our water management systems and our disaster preparedness,” Swain said.
Huang, a project scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a researcher involved in the study, said everyone can make a small effort in combating climate change.
“If we work together to decrease future emissions, we can also reduce the risk of extreme events,” Huang said.
Climate impacts have worsened vast range of human diseases | Climate crisis
More than half of the human diseases caused by pathogens have been worsened at some point by the sort of impacts associated with the climate crisis, a new and exhaustive study of the link between disease and climatic hazards has found.
Diseases such as Zika, malaria, dengue, chikungunya and even Covid-19 have been aggravated by climate impacts such as heatwaves, wildfires, extreme rainfall and floods, the paper found. In all, there are more than 1,000 different pathways for these various impacts to worsen the spread of disease, a cavalcade of threats “too numerous for comprehensive societal adaptations”, the researchers wrote.
Global heating and changed rainfall patterns are expanding the range of disease vectors such as mosquitoes, ticks and fleas, resulting in the spread of malaria, Lyme disease, West Nile virus and other conditions.
Storms and flooding have displaced people, bringing them closer to pathogens that cause outbreaks of gastroenteritis and cholera, while climate impacts have weakened humans’ ability to cope with certain pathogens – drought, for example, can lead to poor sanitation, resulting in dysentery, typhoid fever and other diseases.
“We are opening a Pandora’s Box of disease,” said Camilo Mora, a geographer at the University of Hawaii who led the research. “Because of climate change, we have all these triggers all over the world, over 1,000 of them. There are diseases out there just waiting to be unleashed. It’s like we are poking a stick at a lion – at some point the lion will come and bite us in the ass.”
The researchers combed through more than 70,000 scientific papers that analysed the links between different climatic hazards and infectious disease. Some of these papers look at evidence stretching back 700 years, before the advent of the human-caused climate crisis. Of the 375 different infectious diseases mentioned in these papers, the researchers found that 218, more than half, have been aggravated by climatic impacts now being made more common by global heating.
A smaller proportion of infectious diseases, about 16%, were diminished by climate impacts, according to the paper, published in Nature Climate Change. Kira Webster, co-author of the study, said that as the database of disease grew “we became both fascinated and distressed by the overwhelming number of available case studies that already show how vulnerable we are becoming to our ongoing growing emissions of greenhouse gases”.
Mora said there were probably multiple ways that the climate crisis worsened the spread of Covid, such as habitat disturbances by fire and flood that dislodge wildlife, such as disease-carrying bats, into new areas closer to humans. Mora said he has himself suffered from chronic aches in his joints after contracting chikungunya during an outbreak in Colombia a few years ago after a period of intense rainfall caused a boom in mosquito numbers.
“If there are pathogens that cause us harm, climate change is trying to get to every single one of them,” he said. “For me it’s shocking we don’t take this more seriously.”
The World Health Organization has warned that the climate crisis “threatens to undo the last 50 years of progress in development, global health, and poverty reduction” and has estimated that an additional 250,000 people will die each year from 2030 to 2050 due to proliferating diseases such as malaria and diarrhea, as well as malnutrition and heat stress.
The new research is an “impressive mining of what’s been studied to demonstrate that climate shocks, on balance, make our already daunting task of combating microbes harder”, said Aaron Bernstein, director of the center for climate, health, and the global environment at Harvard University, who was not involved in the study.
“Climate science has shown that climate change makes more parts of the world too hot, too dry, too wet and, ultimately, too unsuitable for people to sustain their livelihoods,” Bernstein added.
“Mass migrations of people may spur infectious outbreaks of all kinds, from meningitis to HIV. In short, an unstable climate creates fertile ground for infectious disease to establish roots in and spread.”
Vast Majority of Long Covid Patients Were Never Hospitalized, Report Finds
The average person suffering from long covid didn’t have a severe infection to begin with, a new report suggests. The study, an examination of private insurance claims, found that three-fourths of diagnosed long covid patients were not hospitalized for covid-19. Additionally, the researchers found that patients were most likely to be co-diagnosed with symptoms such as fatigue and trouble breathing.
Last October, long covid was codified into the latest edition of the International Classification of Disease (ICD-10), a codebook used by doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies for diagnostic and billing purposes. This code, officially known as “U09.9 Post covid-19 condition, unspecified,” allowed patients to be formally recognized as having long covid. But it also provided another way for researchers to study these patients on a larger scale.
This report, conducted by FAIR Health, a nonprofit company that describes itself as having the country’s largest database of privately billed health insurance claims, is one of the first pieces of research to do just that.
Using their database, the authors identified nearly 80,000 patients who had been diagnosed with post-covid symptoms in the four months after the ICD code was implemented, up through January 2022. Most patients (75.8%), they found, had never been hospitalized for their original covid-19 case.
“Post-covid conditions have become an issue of growing national concern,” said Robin Gelburd, FAIR Health president, in a news release. “We hope these findings prove helpful for all individuals diagnosed with post-covid conditions, as well as for providers, payors, policy makers and researchers.”
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Other research has consistently found that the more severe your initial infection, the more likely you are to experience lingering complications and early death. But studies have also shown that even people with mild to moderate cases are at risk for developing a variety of health problems afterward, to a greater extent than people who experience other respiratory infections. Most people who catch covid-19 also don’t end up in the hospital. So while the individual risk of prolonged symptoms may be smallest for people who had milder covid-19, there are simply many more people in that group than there are survivors of severe illness.
The report’s other findings might provide added insight into long covid. The most represented age group of patients (34.6%) were between 36 and 50 years old, for instance, but that might be because older Americans are usually covered through public Medicare plans. Women were more likely to be diagnosed than men and were more likely to not have been hospitalized originally. The three most common conditions to be diagnosed at the same time were “abnormalities of breathing” (23.2%), cough (18.9%), and malaise/fatigue (16.7%). And while many patients did have preexisting health conditions, 30% had been never diagnosed with any chronic illness prior to their long covid.
The report is a white paper, meaning that it hasn’t gone through formal peer review, an important part of validating any scientific research. So the findings should be taken with more caution than usual. No single study, even peer-reviewed, should be the final word on anything. But the sheer amount of data available does lend credibility to the results, and it’s likely that other researchers will be able to use ICD-10 data for similar studies in the future.
For their part, the authors do plan to analyze their data further, both to track the long-term outcomes of these patients and to examine whether vaccination reduced the risk of long covid, as other research has suggested it can.
Until two years ago, mRNA vaccines had never been approved. Now, vast research offers hope in treating more than COVID-19
Illustration by Romain Lasser
When Momar Ndao looks at the ingeniousness of the mRNA technology behind the COVID-19 vaccines, he sees hope in the fight against a category of diseases that blinded his mother and killed his uncle.
As a parasitologist and professor in the division of Experimental Medicine at McGill University, Dr. Ndao studies the worms and microscopic organisms that cause a slew of illnesses many Canadians may never have heard of. Schistosomiasis. Cryptosporidiosis. Chagas disease.
In wealthy countries, these blights are often referred to as neglected tropical diseases, but in poor ones like Dr. Ndao’s native Senegal, they are an ever-present fact of life.
Dr. Ndao was five when his mother lost her sight to onchocerciasis, a worm infection better known as river blindness. Decades later, an uncle who was like a second father to Dr. Ndao developed lymphatic filariasis, a roundworm infection that in his case caused elephantiasis of the testes. He was too ashamed to see a doctor and he died.
Watching the suffering of his family and friends in Senegal compelled Dr. Ndao to seek new treatments and vaccines for some of the 20 neglected diseases that, according to the World Health Organization, kill 200,000 people a year and sicken or maim tens of millions more.
Watching the suffering of his family and friends in Senegal compelled Dr. Ndao to seek new treatments and vaccines for neglected diseases.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
Although these illnesses don’t get the attention that COVID-19 does, they are devastating. Could the mRNA technology that reduced the death toll of the pandemic diminish their toll as well, Dr. Ndao wondered, as the success of these vaccines became apparent. He was far from the only scientist dreaming of how synthetic mRNA could transform their corner of medicine.
The COVID-19 vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, both of which rely on mRNA created in a lab, have been hailed as a medical revolution. Their success has set off a tsunami of interest in using the technology to combat a Who’s Who of modern pestilences. Targets include influenza, Zika, HIV, malaria, cancer, heart disease, cystic fibrosis and “Disease X,” the placeholder name given to whatever yet-to-emerge illness fuels the next global health disaster.
Using mRNA (messenger ribonucleic acid) created in a laboratory, the groundbreaking COVID-19 vaccines teach cells to make a protein that triggers an immune response. They’re faster to produce than conventional vaccines, and the mRNA technology is infinitely reprogrammable. Diseases other than COVID-19 can, in theory, be tackled in similar ways – meaning that the potential applications of synthetic mRNA to prevent illness and treat diseases seems nearly limitless.
“The pandemic has been a total game-changer for the field,” Anna Blakney, a biomedical engineer at the University of British Columbia, said of mRNA science. Before COVID-19, most people had never heard of mRNA, she says. No company had completed a phase three trial of an mRNA product, let alone brought one to market. Now there are two approved mRNA vaccines that have been injected into the arms of hundreds of millions of people worldwide, providing the ultimate proof of concept for a technology that some doubted would ever be ready for prime time.
One of the most exciting projects in Dr. Ndao’s Montreal lab is an experimental vaccine for schistosomiasis, a disease that is second only to malaria in the pantheon of parasitic illnesses inflicting harm around the globe.
Mira Loock, an undergrad in Microbiology and Immunology at McGill University, works in the Cestari lab in April, 2022.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
But turning Dr. Ndao’s concept, which has shown promise in mice, into a safe and effective vaccine will be an immense scientific and logistical challenge – not to mention a financial one, considering how little profit there is to be turned from vaccines that only poor countries need.
Enter Moderna, Inc., the biotechnology company that shot to fortune and fame on the back of the COVID-19 vaccine it developed with the National Institutes of Health in the United States.
In early March, Moderna announced a global program called mRNA Access that will see the company share its vaccine-making recipe and ingredients with scientists working on emerging and neglected diseases. In return, those scientists will share research about the diseases they study, including potential targets for vaccines.
McGill was the first Canadian university to sign onto the framework in principle, and Dr. Ndao was among the first researchers to take part in preliminary meetings with company officials this spring. Not long after, Moderna announced a broader research partnership with the University of Toronto and confirmed it would build a vaccine factory in the Montreal area.
So far, Dr. Ndao and his colleagues have managed to provide strong, though not complete, protection against schistosomiasis in mice with a three-shot regimen made with older vaccine technology. He hopes that deploying mRNA technology against the target his lab has zeroed in on – a protein called Cathepsin B – will lead to a vaccine that offers “complete protection” against schistosomiasis.
In a study released in March, Dr. Blakney and her colleagues found 427 published papers that mentioned the term “RNA vaccine” in 2021, up from 99 in 2020 and next to none in the years before. The pipelines of the three best-known mRNA companies offer a glimpse of what lies ahead if clinical trials pan out. Excluding their COVID-19 products, Massachusetts-based Moderna, Germany’s BioNTech, and CureVac, another German company, have between them 41 human trials in progress, a handful of which are the kind of large, late-stage trials necessary for regulatory approval.
How the mRNA vaccines for
COVID-19 work
For more than 25 years, research labs have been exploring the use of messenger RNA to build the body’s immunity against diseases. With the technology’s proven efficacy against the COVID-19 virus, researchers see a future in which the platform could be used to make vaccines and treatments for many more diseases, including malaria, tuberculosis, hepatitis B, cystic fibrosis and even HIV, for which human trials of an mRNA vaccine have already begun.
The vaccine is a Messenger RNA (mRNA) encased in a lipid envelope
The vaccine enters in a compartment (an endosome) formed from the cell membrane
The endosome fuses with the lipid envelope and the mRNA is released. The mRNA carries the instructions for making copies of the virus’ spike proteins
Ribosomes, the cell’s protein builders, read the mRNA and produce a long chain of amino acids called a polypeptide
The polypeptides assemble to form the viral spike proteins
The cell displays the spike proteins to the immune system
The immune system is primed to produce antibodies that prevent the virus from attaching to host cells via the ACE2 receptor
MURAT YÜKSELIR /
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
How the mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 work
For more than 25 years, research labs have been exploring the use of messenger RNA to build the body’s immunity against diseases. With the technology’s proven efficacy against the COVID-19 virus, researchers see a future in which the platform could be used to make vaccines and treatments for many more diseases, including malaria, tuberculosis, hepatitis B, cystic fibrosis and even HIV, for which human trials of an mRNA vaccine have already begun.
The vaccine is a Messenger RNA (mRNA) encased in a lipid envelope
The vaccine enters in a compartment (an endosome) formed from the cell membrane
The endosome fuses with the lipid envelope and the mRNA is released. The mRNA carries the instructions for making copies of the virus’ spike proteins
Ribosomes, the cell’s protein builders, read the mRNA and produce a long chain of amino acids called a polypeptide
The polypeptides assemble to form the viral spike proteins
The cell displays the spike proteins to the immune system
The immune system is primed to produce antibodies that prevent the virus from attaching to host cells via the ACE2 receptor
MURAT YÜKSELIR /
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
How the mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 work
For more than 25 years, research labs have been exploring the use of messenger RNA to build the body’s immunity against diseases. With the technology’s proven efficacy against the COVID-19 virus, researchers see a future in which the platform could be used to make vaccines and treatments for many more diseases, including malaria, tuberculosis, hepatitis B, cystic fibrosis and even HIV, for which human trials of an mRNA vaccine have already begun.
The vaccine is a Messenger RNA (mRNA) encased in a lipid envelope
The immune system is primed to produce antibodies that prevent the virus from attaching to host cells via the ACE2 receptor
The cell displays the spike proteins to the immune system
The polypeptides assemble to form the viral spike proteins
The vaccine enters in a compartment (an endosome) formed from the cell membrane
The endosome fuses with the lipid envelope and the mRNA is released. The mRNA carries the instructions for making copies of the virus’ spike proteins
Ribosomes, the cell’s protein builders, read the mRNA and produce a long chain of amino acids called a polypeptide
MURAT YÜKSELIR / THE GLOBE AND MAIL
The three companies have nearly three dozen more potential vaccines and medications in pre-clinical development. In BioNTech’s case, many are personalized cancer vaccines, the focus of the company’s research before it partnered with the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to produce its COVID-19 vaccine. Moderna has candidates for influenza, RSV (a virus that can cause severe respiratory illness in the very young and very old) Zika, HIV and other viruses, along with bespoke cancer vaccines and prospective mRNA treatments for rare diseases.
Two of those medications are being tested at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children on a handful of kids with propionic acidemia and methylmalonic acidemia, a pair of rare inherited metabolic disorders with no good treatments. It’s early days for the trial, but Neal Sondheimer, the head of metabolic genetics at SickKids, is buoyed by how the mRNA treatments succeeded in animal testing.
“It’s heartening to me to be working on something that looks more into the future when these kids will do better and won’t get so sick,” he said.
Drew Weissman, the director of vaccine research at the University of Pennsylvania, said he’s lost count of all the mRNA projects his lab has on the go. The farthest along are five phase one trials: Two for HIV, two for influenza and one for genital herpes.
But the undertakings that excite him most are those that push the boundaries of mRNA science.
To cite one example, his lab is conducting animal experiments using mRNA technology to teach cells to fix damaged heart tissue. His team concocted an mRNA injection that prodded mice to produce Chimeric Antigen Receptor T cells, better known as CAR-T cells, that proved capable of repairing fibrosis on the hearts of mice. Treatments up until now have used CAR-T cells genetically engineered outside a patient’s body and injected as a form of personalized immunotherapy against certain blood cancers, a process that costs about half-a-million dollars per patient.
Hundreds of thousands of people die each year from neglected diseases, but the messenger RNA technology used in two COVID-19 vaccines opens the door for new treatments. Understand the principles of mRNA tech and meet the scientist from McGill University who hopes it will lead to an effective vaccine for a parasite-borne disease called schistosomiasis.
The Globe and Mail
The mouse experiments in Dr. Weissman’s lab, the results of which were published in the journal Science in January, suggest it might be possible, with a simple IV injection of mRNA, to teach the body to make its own CAR-T cells capable of repairing the scarring that is a hallmark of cardiac disease.
In other words, mRNA could reprogram T cells to fix a broken heart.
“We’re now taking that targeting and expanding it to many different types of treatments,” Dr. Weissman told The Globe and Mail, “for fibrosis of the liver and the lung, for treatment of lymphomas and leukemias, for treatment of autoimmunity, for many different things.”
Dr. Weissman’s lab is a hive of mRNA science for good reason: It was the birthplace of the modified mRNA used in both the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines.
When Dr. Weissman and his research partner, Katalin Kariko, a Hungarian-born biochemist who is now a senior vice-president at BioNTech, published details of their pivotal discovery in 2005, the wider scientific world didn’t pay much attention. Notoriously fragile and difficult to work with, mRNA seemed an impractical backbone for a new class of drugs.
Seventeen years and one devastating global pandemic later, the pair are considered likely candidates for a Nobel Prize.
A single-stranded molecule, mRNA delivers instructions from a cell’s DNA to its ribosomes, the cellular machines that make proteins. Dr. Kariko’s vision, which built upon earlier discoveries by other scientists, was to make synthetic mRNA that could tell cells to pump out any protein she chose, effectively converting the cells into microscopic medicine factories. (In the now familiar case of the COVID-19 vaccines, mRNA instructs the cells to produce a harmless piece of the spike protein found on the surface of the coronavirus, tricking the immune system into performing a dry run that readies it to fight the real virus.) If Dr. Kariko’s idea worked, future scientists would be able to plug the DNA sequence encoding for a specific protein into fancy lab equipment and watch as it spit out the right mRNA.
Taking that idea from theory to reality took decades of trial, error and rejection. Dr. Kariko first had to master the science of creating mRNA in a lab, then she and Dr. Weissman had to figure out why, against all expectations, their mRNA was making lab mice sick.
The rodents’ immune systems, it turned out, were greeting the synthetic mRNA as a foreign invader and mounting a dangerous inflammatory response. Dr. Kariko and Dr. Weissman’s solution was to rearrange the chemical bonds on one part of the mRNA, creating a modified molecule that tricked the immune system into lowering its defences. That was the breakthrough, published in their seminal 2005 paper, that made mRNA as medicine feasible.
From left, scientists Pieter Cullis, Drew Weissman and Katalin Kariko stand on stage after receiving the 2022 Vinfuture Grand Prize for their work on mRNA technology.NHAC NGUYEN/AFP/Getty Images
The next crucial step was swaddling the modified mRNA in lipid nanoparticles, tiny globules of fat engineered primarily by University of British Columbia scientist Pieter Cullis. The lipid nanoparticles, now the subject of a messy patent fight among a handful of biotechnology companies with roots in UBC, delivered the fragile mRNA safely across the cell membrane.
Drs. Kariko, Weissman and Cullis were honoured last month with the Canada Gairdner International Award, a $100,000 accolade that has been a precursor to a Nobel prize for nearly 100 other scientists.
The speed of development and initial efficacy of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines made the technology seem like an overnight success, but as Dr. Kariko told The Globe in an interview before receiving the Gairdner, in reality, “it took a zillion overnights.”
Noubar Afeyan, a chairman and co-founder of Moderna, at the Flagship Pioneer office in Cambridge, MA.Simon Simard/The Globe and Mail
The results, though, of those zillion overnights meant that when a new virus began circulating in China in late 2019, the handful of pharmaceutical companies with expertise in mRNA were primed to create a prototype vaccine faster than ever before.
It was a bitterly cold night in January of 2020, when Noubar Afeyan, Moderna’s chairman and one of its four co-founders, stepped away from his daughter’s birthday dinner to take a call from Stéphane Bancel, Moderna’s chief executive officer.
Mr. Bancel was in Switzerland at the Davos forum, where, as Dr. Afeyan recalled it, alarmed public health experts had “nearly accosted” him asking if there was anything Moderna could do about the mysterious pneumonia spreading in Wuhan.
The company had multiple mRNA vaccines in the works, including one against Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, a close cousin of the original SARS. Crucially, the platform was easily re-engineered; it was “always aimed at enabling a whole wide family of medicines,” said Dr. Afeyan, an entrepreneur whose family fled Lebanon’s civil war for Montreal when he was 13. As a teenager, he lived in a high-rise overlooking the McGill campus where he would later study chemical engineering.
Like their rivals at BioNTech, Moderna’s scientists made a prototype vaccine in a few days. Both shots proved safe and 95-per-cent efficacious at preventing symptomatic cases of COVID-19 in the pivotal phase-three trials that won them regulatory approval in less than a year, smashing all previous records for vaccine development. And once they began to be dispensed around the world at the end of 2020 and in early 2021, their ability to prevent severe illness and death proved to be a historic breakthrough.
When Omicron overcame the vaccines’ defences against mild infections, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna had to hasten their work on variant-specific boosters and a pan-coronavirus shot.ARND WIEGMANN/Reuters
Some of the shine has since come off those COVID-19 shots, less because of the vaccines themselves than the virus, which has cycled through progressively more contagious variants at speeds even the malleable mRNA vaccines can’t match.
Omicron punched the biggest hole yet in the vaccines’ defences against mild infections, spurring Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna to hasten their work on variant-specific boosters and a pan-coronavirus shot. Fortunately, the existing COVID-19 shots are holding strong against severe illness and death, especially for those who’ve received three or more doses.
Still, the challenge raised by coronavirus variants is a reminder that, as high as hopes are for mRNA technology, there are good reasons for skepticism, too.
The biggest worry is that other pathogens may not be easy pickings for a vaccine the way SARS-CoV-2 was. Decades of research on the original SARS and MERS meant that by the time Chinese scientists sequenced SARS-CoV-2, it was well understood that a coronavirus’s spike protein would make a juicy target for a vaccine. The mRNA vaccines may have emerged as clear winners, but competing vaccines crossed the regulatory finish line as well, and they used more conventional approaches.
Jesse Clark, an infectious disease physician at UCLA’s school of medicine, said SARS-CoV-2 is simply not that complicated a foe. “In terms of complexity of the viral structure,” he said, “you’re looking at something that’s made at an elementary school level.”
By contrast, a pathogen such as HIV is an “advanced PhD level” opponent, ceaselessly mutating to defeat every previous attempt at a vaccine, Dr. Clark said. The latest failure was a Johnson & Johnson HIV candidate that used a defanged adenovirus as a delivery system for the vaccine’s payload – the same basic technology that worked in J & J’s COVID-19 vaccine.
As co-leader of an early-stage National Institutes of Health trial of three mRNA vaccines for HIV, Dr. Clark still sees promise in the platform. He just wants to temper expectations.
Patrick Ott, director of the Center for Personal Cancer Vaccines at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, feels the same way. He’s wary of the hype surrounding bespoke mRNA cancer vaccines, most of which are plodding through small, early-stage trials.
Dr. Ott understands the concept is tantalizing: Sequence a patient’s tumour, insert the right code into the mRNA platform that curbed the pandemic, then inject a tailor-made vaccine that teaches the immune system to seek and destroy a unique cancer if it tries to recur.
Unfortunately, “cancer is just a totally different disease,” from COVID-19 and far harder to combat with a shot, he stressed. “It’s definitely a new world where we can do this now, “ with mRNA, he added, “but we have to figure out how to do it, and then it will take us some time to get there.”
Both Dr. Clark and Dr. Ott pointed out that, at the end of the day, mRNA is just an elegant messenger. Someone has to tell it what message to deliver, which proteins to order up. It requires a target.
That’s where the fundamental science undertaken by researchers such as McGill’s Dr. Ndao and his colleague, Igor Cestari, come in.
Dr. Ndao is researching parasitic worms that cause schistosomiasis, which thrive in rivers teeming with a certain type of freshwater snail.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
In his lab at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre, Dr. Ndao holds up a glass jar of the parasites that cause schistosomiasis (they thrive in rivers teeming with a certain type of freshwater snail). The jar appears to hold nothing but water until Dr. Ndao shakes it, prompting dozens of wiggly, translucent flatworms the size of a fingernail cuticle to flicker into view. (Other specimens in his collection are easier to see. One is a coiled roundworm so large that lab workers have slapped the label “Big Bertha” on its jar.)
When the parasites pierce human skin, they maturate and the females produce eggs that travel to the intestine, liver or bladder, causing inflammation, fibrosis and scarring. Repeated infections, particularly in children who bathe and frolic in tropical rivers, lead to malnutrition, anemia and learning problems. Long-term untreated infections can also damage multiple organs, especially the liver.
There are no approved shots for parasitic diseases, save for one poor-performing vaccine for malaria.
Dr. Ndao, the long-time director of the National Reference Centre for Parasitology, and his fellow researchers found that suppressing a protein called Cathepsin B inhibited the ability of the parasites to digest red blood cells, starving them. Before the mRNA Access program came about, Dr. Ndao’s lab tested a three-dose vaccine using older technology that reduced the number of adult worms and eggs in mice by approximately 70 per cent, according to a study published in The Lancet’s eBioMedicine journal.
Dr. Ndao thinks an mRNA approach could work even better against Cathepsin B. It’s early days, but he’s looking forward to finding out if Moderna’s mRNA Access partnership lives up to its potential.
So is Dr. Cestari. His lab at McGill’s Institute of Parasitology is working on finding targets for a vaccine against Chagas disease, a parasitic infection first identified in his native Brazil. Left untreated, Chagas causes irreversible heart damage.
Dr. Cestari is leading a painstaking search for the best vaccine targets by slicing the DNA of the parasite that causes Chagas into millions of fragments and inserting those fragments into yeast. As the yeast grows, the parasite’s proteins are expressed on the surface of the yeast, allowing Dr. Cestari to bathe them in serum from the blood of Chagas patients to see what sticks. Seeing what sticks helps him to identify which proteins might make good targets for a vaccine.
Igor Cestari, Assistant Professor at McGill’s Institute of Parasitology, is working on finding targets for a vaccine against Chagas disease, a parasitic infection first identified in his native Brazil.Fred Lum/The Globe and Mail
He has invested nearly two years of pandemic-interrupted labour to refine his list of the top 10 to 20 proteins to target. He’s nearly there now. The next step would be making his own prototype vaccine for Chagas, but if Moderna is willing to design one for him using their mRNA and his targets, development time could drop significantly.
“In theory, when I have the code, it’s as simple as sending a text message,” Dr. Cestari said, “and someone on the other side would put it in a machine to synthesize the RNA.”
Reality is more complicated. Dr. Cestari said he and McGill would want to patent the sequences of his targets before sharing them with Moderna. He would also want to hammer out terms on shared intellectual property with an eye to ensuring a future vaccine is affordable in the central and south American countries where Chagas is endemic.
One of the discouraging lessons of the pandemic is that, in the event of an emergency, wealthy countries will snap up life-changing vaccines and treatments for their own populations first, neglecting the welfare of the developing world. Pharmaceutical companies, meanwhile, will always have profit margins and shareholders to think of first.
When it comes to ensuring tomorrow’s mRNA breakthroughs are available to those who need them most, publicly funded universities and scientists can do their part by writing equity access provisions into legal agreements with pharmaceutical companies, said Srinivas Murthy, a UBC critical care and infectious disease professor who co-chairs the WHO’s clinical research committee on COVID-19.
“The classic line is that we socialize all the risk, namely within the universities and researchers,” Dr. Murthy said. “Then, as soon as something is there, a company runs off and just develops it and recoups all the benefits.”
In interviews with The Globe, senior officials at Moderna Canada, McGill and the University of Toronto, all said the overarching research partnerships announced this spring were frameworks for co-operation. If any specific projects go forward they’ll be subject to individual legal agreements, the details of which are usually confidential.
For Dr. Cestari, the legal fine print is important, but not as important as the science itself. As the soft-spoken Brazilian moves around his Montreal lab, showing off petri dishes of yeast and scribbling on his white board to explain the mind-bending research he and his team are pursuing, his excitement at the thought of one day inventing a vaccine is infectious.
“You can see I’m a dreamer, right?” Dr. Cestari said. “I’m not shy of hope.”
with a report from Ivan Semeniuk
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