A suspected anthrax epidemic has hit livestock in the Bawku West District of the Upper East Region. Joy News sources revealed that over twenty cattle died in one farm alone under strange circumstances. Some herdsmen and livestock farmers have seen their cattle die strangely. Some of the affected herdsmen told Joy News they woke up Friday only to see their cattle lie dead on their farms. One of the worried livestock farmers told Joy News they had lost twenty-seven cattle as at Friday. He said the cattle showed no signs of sickness on Thursday and expressed worry over the situation. The farmer said officers from the veterinary services had visited their farm and injected the animals but the situation is the same. District Chief Executive for the area, Anaba Adam Moro however said no reports of an anthrax outbreak have been made to his office. Mr. Moro urged the farmers to remain calm as officers begin thorough assessment of the situation for prompt action to be taken.
Biohazard name:
Anthrax (cattle)
Biohazard level:
4/4 Hazardous
Biohazard desc.:
Viruses and bacteria that cause severe to fatal disease in humans, and for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, H5N1(bird flu), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus, hantaviruses, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and other hemorrhagic or unidentified diseases. When dealing with biological hazards at this level the use of a Hazmat suit and a self-contained oxygen supply is mandatory. The entrance and exit of a Level Four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, autonomous detection system, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a Biosafety Level 4 (P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.
A suspected anthrax epidemic has hit livestock in the Bawku West District of the Upper East Region.
Joy News sources revealed that over twenty cattle died in one farm alone under strange circumstances.
Some herdsmen and livestock farmers have seen their cattle die strangely. Some of the affected herdsmen told Joy News they woke up Friday only to see their cattle lie dead on their farms.
One of the worried livestock farmers told Joy News they had lost twenty-seven cattle as at Friday. He said the cattle showed no signs of sickness on Thursday and expressed worry over the situation.
The farmer said officers from the veterinary services had visited their farm and injected the animals but the situation is the same.
District Chief Executive for the area, Anaba Adam Moro however said no reports of an anthrax outbreak have been made to his office.
Mr. Moro urged the farmers to remain calm as officers begin thorough assessment of the situation for prompt action to be taken.
A drug user has died in Suffolk after being infected with anthrax. Ambulance genericThe Health Protection Agency (HPA) said the victim had injected heroin. There has been a small outbreak of cases in Europe, with 13 cases identified by health officials since June last year. Seven of the cases have occurred in the UK, including one in Scotland and one in Wales. Four of the five people who contracted the bacterial infection in England have died, experts said. The HPA said the source of the infection is presumed to be contaminated heroin. The HPA said it is “unclear” whether the British cases are linked to the European outbreak which has affected drug users in Denmark, Germany and France. Dr Chris Williams, consultant in communicable disease control at the HPA in Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, said: “Anthrax can be cured with antibiotics, if treatment is started early. It is therefore important for medical professionals to be alert to the possibility of anthrax infection in heroin users presenting with signs and symptoms – which include severe soft tissue infections or blood poisoning – to prevent any delays in providing treatment. “It is possible that further cases may be seen in people who inject heroin. People who use drugs may become infected with anthrax when the heroin they use is contaminated with anthrax spores. This could be a source of infection if injected, smoked or snorted – there is no safe route for consuming heroin or other drugs that may be contaminated with anthrax spores.”
Biohazard name:
Heroin contaminated with antrax
Biohazard level:
3/4 Hight
Biohazard desc.:
Bacteria and viruses that can cause severe to fatal disease in humans, but for which vaccines or other treatments exist, such as anthrax, West Nile virus, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, SARS virus, variola virus (smallpox), tuberculosis, typhus, Rift Valley fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, yellow fever, and malaria. Among parasites Plasmodium falciparum, which causes Malaria, and Trypanosoma cruzi, which causes trypanosomiasis, also come under this level.
Symptoms:
Status:
confirmed
…
Drug user dies after anthrax infection
Health Protection Agency reports heroin user in Suffolk died after injecting what is presumed to be contaminated drug
Anthrax bacteria. A heroin user has died of the disease. The Health Protection Agency has reported seven anthrax case in the UK since June last year. Photograph: Smc Images/Getty Images
A drug user has died after being infected with anthrax, health experts have said.
The Health Protection Agency (HPA) said the person, who injected heroin, had died in Suffolk.
There has been a small outbreak of cases in Europe, with 13 cases identified by health officials since June last year.
Seven of the cases have occurred in the UK, including one in Scotland and one in Wales. Four of the five people who contracted the bacterial infection in England have died, experts said.
The HPA said the source of the infection is presumed to be contaminated heroin.
Two of the deaths occurred in Blackpool and the other death was a drug user in Medway, Kent.
The HPA said it is “unclear” whether the British cases are linked to the European outbreak which has affected drug users in Denmark, Germany and France.
Anthrax is a bacterial infection and is primarily a disease of herbivorous mammals, though other animals and some birds can also become infected. Drug users can be exposed when heroin is contaminated with anthrax spores.
A total of 22 people are confirmed to be infected with the deadly anthrax bacterium. The Ministry of Health and Social Services have embarked on a mass campaign to create awareness about the disease and warn people to be on the lookout for symptoms. The disease broke out on January 17 in the Oniipa Constituency in the Oshikoto Region. Dr Norbert Forster, the deputy permanent secretary in the Ministry of Health and Social Services, yesterday said the two people who had died had both eaten anthrax-infected beef.According to him, the other 22 cases involve people who touched infected meat or the skin of the animals. As a result, they suffer from skin rash and have blisters. They are all treated with antibiotics “and they’re doing fine,” he said. Forster warned residents of the area to report animals that die to the department of veterinary services. “They should not slaughter and eat the animals.” It is understood that about ten cattle were infected with the disease. Andrew Ndishishi, the permanent secretary, says anthrax is usually a fatal animal disease caused by a bacterium. “Anthrax in animals is endemic in the Etosha National Park and occurs from time to time in all regions bordering Etosha.” Humans, Ndishishi says, can become infected if in contact with sick or dead animals and may die if not treated early with antibiotics.
The bacterium, according to the PS, can survive in the environment for decades in the form of spores. Humans can further be infected by inhaling the bacterium which then results in a lung infection. “The disease usually occurs between one to seven days after contact, but this incubation period may extend to five to six weeks.” Most people present with skin infection – itching of the infected area, then blisters and later a black crust. Those who eat an infected animal suffer from nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea, the PS said. Those patients with a lung infection suffer from coughing, difficult breathing and a high fever.
Ndishishi called on people who show these symptoms to report to a health facility immediately. “All persons who might have visited the Oshikoto Region during December – January and experience such symptoms, should report to the nearest health facility.” He stressed that prevention of human infection starts with prevention in animals. Therefore, he said, animals need to be vaccinated and carcasses need to be correctly disposed of. Infected patients are isolated and treated with antibiotics. “Mass vaccination and quarantine of humans is not recommended.”
A woman has died after injecting herself with heroin contaminated with anthrax. An inquest has been opened after Claire Skelton, 42, from Rochester, Kent, died at King’s College Hospital in London on December 9. The cause of death was given as anthrax and intravenous drug abuse. Her death is the third in Britain linked to an outbreak of anthrax among drug users believed to have used contaminated heroin. The Health Protection Agency said 13 cases of anthrax among people who inject drugs have been reported in several European countries since June. Six of the cases have occurred in the UK, including four in England, one in Scotland and one in Wales. Earlier this year, two drug users died in Blackpool after contracting the bacterial infection. The HPA said the source of the infection is presumed to be contaminated heroin. Anthrax is an acute bacterial infection that normally infects humans when they inhale or ingest anthrax spores.
Biohazard name:
Heroin contaminated with antrax
Biohazard level:
4/4 Hazardous
Biohazard desc.:
Viruses and bacteria that cause severe to fatal disease in humans, and for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, H5N1(bird flu), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus, hantaviruses, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and other hemorrhagic or unidentified diseases. When dealing with biological hazards at this level the use of a Hazmat suit and a self-contained oxygen supply is mandatory. The entrance and exit of a Level Four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, autonomous detection system, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a Biosafety Level 4 (P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.
A view of the mountains affected by tremors in Mayoon and Hussainabad villages of Hunza-Nagar District. PHOTO: SHABBIR MIR/THE EXPRESS TRIBUNE
GILGIT: At least 15 families have abandoned their houses due to landslides triggered by tremors in two villages of Hunza-Nagar District.
The landslides damaged a main water channel and other public and private property in Mayoon and Hussainabad villages.
“At least 15 families have moved in with their relatives in view of the looming threat,” Shahzad Hussain, a resident of the area told The Express Tribune on Monday. He said that the landslides started two weeks ago.
So far a main water channel, a link road and 12 electricity polls have been damaged. The landslides have also destroyed wild fruit trees.
“There is no light or no water in the area,” Hussain said, adding that the remaining villagers are also considering moving due to the tremors. Complaints to officials over the disrupted water and electricity supply yielded no result.
Another resident said fissures have already appeared in the ground in some parts. He said the villagers who had moved away did so on the advice of experts sent by a non-governmental organisation.
Another villager said, “We hope the government will act swiftly to minimise our losses.”
Others were not as hopeful, saying that past landslides have devastated several houses, orchards and standing crops in Shinaki area, but the government did not do anything for the people.
Gilgit-Baltistan Disaster Management Authority Director Burhan Afandi said that the government is planning to conduct a survey in the area to find the cause behind landslides and tremors.
“Thirteen families have been relocated as a precautionary measure and we will be conducting a survey to find out the causes,” he said.
In 2010, the government had shifted 55 families from Hussainabad village to safer places due to landslides, but later the villages returned as the situation turned back to normal. According to the then Hunza deputy commissioner, fissures had developed on some parts of the surface, causing landslide in the region, which is on a fault line.
Baku, Fineko/abc.az. American seismologist predicts an increase in seismic activity of Baku and on the Absheron peninsula.
At the International Seismology Conference taking place in Baku American scientist and seismologist Robert King has informed that in Baku and Absheron peninsula it is expected an increase in seismic activity as a result of compression fracture between the Minor and the Greater Caucasus.
“Our research showed that the Arabian and Eurasian lithospheric plate is characterized by high strength, and as a result they do not deform internally, and tremors are the result of oceanic activity, located between these territories. In the entire Caucasus a fault is observed, in the south and the north there is some movement and deformation in the lowlands between the Minor and the Greater Caucasus. In the Baku seismic zone the speed of fault is 12 mm a year over 100 km. At that, to the south of Baku it is observed fracture and displacement of the Earth’s crust in the direction of the Caspian Sea, where compression takes place that will lead to a narrowing of the Caspian Sea. At the same time, we find it difficult to predict the results of all the occurring processes,” he said.
According to Mr. King, in order to predict the results of the occurring processes it is needed to determine whether a similar contraction is in the depths of the earth, develop a range of different geodetic models, neotectonics, a map of faults that will be possible as the installation of 25 new seismic stations.
“To continue the research, stations should be installed at a distance of 5-10 km from each other on the perimeter of the fault. It is necessary to invest in this as much money as has already been invested in the purchase and installation of stations in order to study the processes occurring in the soil, as well as raising of the level of oil reservoirs. All these studies are important in order to determine possible effects of very large deformations that occur to the south of Baku, in order to prepare for a possible earthquake,” he said.
A preliminary 6.4-magnitude earthquake struck 452 miles northwest of the Balleny Islands region early this morning at 2:32 a.m., but presented no tsunami threat to Hawaii, according to the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center.
The earthquake struck at a depth of about 6.3 miles.
The Balleny Islands are a series of uninhabited volcanic islands that are part of Antarctica.
A large wildfire has erupted Tuesday around noon on the Vitosha Mountain just outside Bulgaria’s capital Sofia. Firefighters have been alerted by citizens about a blaze in the Mecha Polyana (Bear’s Glade) area between the Aleko center and the Bistrishko Branishte reserve in the mountain. The billowing smoke, fanned by high winds, is clearly visited from Sofia, which is located on Vitosha’s northern foothills. Bulgaria’s firefigthing service has reported that the blaze is hard to tackle due to the terrain and windy conditions. 70 firefighters and foresters have been sent to the location, which currently encompasses some 2.5 acres of alpine grassland and pine forest.
Heavy rains caused flooding that killed seven people in the southern Russian province of Dagestan on Wednesday, the Emergency Situations Ministry said. About 320 homes in the Caspian Sea coastal city of Derbent close to the Caucasus Mountains were flooded and seven bodies were found, the ministry said. In Derbent, warnings were issued from loudspeakers at mosques and mounted on cars dispatched around the city in the mostly Muslim province, Ekho Moskvy radio reported.
Puerto Rico’s health department has declared a dengue epidemic. Health Secretary Lorenzo Gonzalez says at least six people have died, including two children younger than 10. A total of 4,816 cases have been reported, including 21 cases of the potentially fatal hemorrhagic dengue. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says 342 new cases were reported in one week last month, twice the number of cases during the same period last year. Dengue cases usually flare up from August to January. The mosquito-borne virus causes fever, severe headaches and extreme joint and muscle pain. Dengue claimed a record 31 lives during a 2010 epidemic that saw more than 12,000 suspected cases. Gonzalez made the announcement on Monday.
Biohazard name:
Dengue Fever
Biohazard level:
3/4 Hight
Biohazard desc.:
Bacteria and viruses that can cause severe to fatal disease in humans, but for which vaccines or other treatments exist, such as anthrax, West Nile virus, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, SARS virus, variola virus (smallpox), tuberculosis, typhus, Rift Valley fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, yellow fever, and malaria. Among parasites Plasmodium falciparum, which causes Malaria, and Trypanosoma cruzi, which causes trypanosomiasis, also come under this level.
The Swedish icebreaker Oden off the coast of Antarctica, with an emperor penguin in the foreground. Credit: J. Wegelius. (Phys.org)—An international team of scientists, including a University of Michigan graduate student, has demonstrated that a clear difference exists between the marine microbial communities in the Southern and Arctic oceans, contributing to a better understanding of the biodiversity of marine life at the poles.
The most comprehensive comparison of microbial diversity at both of Earth’s polar oceans showed that about 75 percent of the organisms at each pole are different. This insight sheds light on newly recognized biodiversity patterns and reinforces the importance of studying Earth’s polar regions in the face of a changing climate. And it highlights the need for further research on the impacts of sea ice, seasonal shifts and freshwater input in both regions. “We believe that significant differences in the environmental conditions at each pole and unique selection mechanisms in the Arctic and Southern oceans are at play in controlling surface and deep-ocean community structure,” said Alison Murray, leader of the international team and an associate research professor at the Desert Research Institute in Reno, Nev.
A sample-collecting device called a rosette is lowered into the ocean off the coast of Antarctica. Credit: Lollie Garay. Kevin Bakker, a graduate student in the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, is a co-author of the PNAS paper. Before arriving at U-M last month, Bakker conducted molecular and microbial marine science off the coast of Antarctica while working at the University of Georgia. The scientists found that the differences between the two poles were most pronounced in the microbial communities sampled from the coastal regions, which is “likely a result of the significant differences in freshwater sourcing to the two polar oceans,” said Jean-François Ghiglione, first author of the report and research professor at the French Microbial Oceanography Laboratory.
In the Southern Ocean, glacial melt water accounts for most of the freshwater that flows into the system, Ghiglione said. In contrast, the Arctic Ocean receives much bigger pulses of freshwater from several large river systems with huge continental drainage basins, in addition to glacial melt water. While the surface microbial communities appear to be dominated by environmental selection, the deep ocean communities are more constrained by historical events and connected through oceanic circulation, providing evidence for biogeographically defined communities in the global ocean. “Neither latitude nor temperature drove the composition of the surface bacterial communities directly. Rather, short-term effects such as seasonal river input or melting glaciers shaped community composition,” said U-M’s Bakker. “In contrast, it seems like the deep oceans are driven more by long-term changes.”
U-M graduate student Kevin Bakker in a laboratory aboard the icebreaker Oden. After collecting water samples, Bakker filtered the water to extract microbial DNA, then sent the genetic material to another lab for sequencing. Credit: Patricia Yager. The collaboration involved scientists from six countries: Canada, France, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden and the United States. The project was made possible through the International Polar Year, a global research campaign, and the Sloan Foundation’s Census of Marine Life Program, which stimulated field efforts at both poles, along with a separate program targeting marine microbes, the International Census of Marine Microbes. In addition, the national polar research programs from each of the six contributing nations, including the U.S. National Science Foundation, supported field expeditions. “The collective energies required to bring this study to fruition was remarkable,” Murray said. “By using similar strategies and technologies in sample collection through next-generation sequencing, we have a highly comparable, unprecedented data set that for the first time has allowed us to take an in-depth look across a large number of samples into the similarities of the microbial communities between the two polar oceans.” Scientists compared 20 samples from the Southern Ocean against 24 samples from the Arctic Ocean taken from both surface and deep-water sites. They also included an additional 48 samples from Earth’s lower latitudes to investigate the polar signal in global marine bacterial biogeography. The researchers specifically compared samples from coastal and open oceans and between winter and summer seasons to test whether or how environmental conditions and dispersal patterns shape microbial communities in the polar oceans. Samples were processed and analyzed by the International Census of Marine Microbes using an identical approach based on pyrosequencing and involving more than 800,000 sequences from each of the 92 samples. “Our analyses identified a number of key organisms in both poles in the surface and deep-ocean waters that are important in driving the differences between the communities,” Murray said. “Still, further research is needed to address the ecological and evolutionary processes that underlie these unique patterns.”
More information: “Pole-to-pole biogeography of surface and deep marine bacterial communities,” by Jean-Francois Ghiglione et al. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1208160109
A sunspot, currently located on the farside of the sun, is about to emerge over the sun’s southeastern limb. It is crackling with M-class solar flares and could bring a significant uptick in solar activity.
Laden with supplies, SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft is approaching the International Space Station for docking on Wednesday, Oct. 10th. Last night, David Blanchard saw the commercial spacecraft chasing the ISS across the sky above Flagstaff, Arizona:
“The Dragon capsule raced to catch the ISS as the pair moved across the western sky separated by about 20 seconds,” says Blanhard. “This image is a single 30-s exposure that shows the separation and how Dragon trails ISS.”
On Wednesday, these two streaks will merge. As the Dragon approaches the ISS, astronaut and station commander Suni Williams will reach out with the station’s robot arm to grapple the capsule. The spacecraft will then be joined to one of the station’s ports where astronauts will unload its 1,000 pounds of food, clothing, science gear and other items. Later, the astronauts will load almost 2,000 pounds of used equipment and experiments into the Dragon to be returned to Earth safely in about three weeks.
For the third day in a row, geomagnetic storms are circling the poles. In North America, auroras have spilled across the Canadian border descending as far south as Utah, Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska. The best place to see the show, according to pilot Matt Melnyk, is from the window of an airplane:
“I photographed an unbelievable display from the cockpit at 21,000 feet while flying across Alberta Canada,” says Melnyk. “Being the pilot we get a front row view of the amazing aurora and this display was nothing less than spectacular!”
The storms were instigated by a CME strike on Oct. 8th and they are about to be re-energized by a solar wind stream due to hit Earth’s magnetic field on Oct. 10th. NOAA forecasters estimate a 40% chance of strong geomagnetic storms during the next 24 hours, so high-latitude sky watchers should remain alert for auroras
A large section of coastline in South Africa has been closed after a 30-metre whale washed ashore following an attack by Great White sharks. The whale was removed from the surf after its carcass attracted high numbers of Great Whites to the coast by Muizenberg beach, near Cape Town, on Sunday. Authorities have since taken the southern right whale from the beach but have closed off a stretch of shore from Muizenberg to Monwabisi ‘as a precaution’. Disaster response teams had moved swiftly to get the animal out of the water and onto a flat-bed truck. Wilfred Solomons-Johannes, a spokesman for Cape Town’s disaster risk management centre, said: ‘A decision was taken to begin the recovery operation immediately because of the increase of shark activity off beaches along the False Bay coastline.’ The warning did not stop curious onlookers streaming to the site. Claire McKinnon, manager of the Cape Town cleansing and solid-waste management department, said samples were taken from the carcass to enable pathologists to establish the cause of death before it was disposed of at a landfill site. Once the whale was out of the water, a bulldozer rolled it over the sand. Solomons-Johannes said it was not known whether the whale was alive when the sharks attacked it or had succumbed to an illness. ‘Under normal circumstances predators such as sharks often sneak up on their prey from behind or underneath. Predators don’t usually face off in a fight,’ he said. ‘A predator goes in quickly and quietly attacks the prey. Predators choose the ill, injured, young or old animals to hunt because they are easier to catch.’
Biohazard name:
Shark Attack (Great White Shark)
Biohazard level:
1/4 Low
Biohazard desc.:
Bacteria and viruses including Bacillus subtilis, canine hepatitis, Escherichia coli, varicella (chicken pox), as well as some cell cultures and non-infectious bacteria. At this level precautions against the biohazardous materials in question are minimal, most likely involving gloves and some sort of facial protection. Usually, contaminated materials are left in open (but separately indicated) waste receptacles. Decontamination procedures for this level are similar in most respects to modern precautions against everyday viruses (i.e.: washing one’s hands with anti-bacterial soap, washing all exposed surfaces of the lab with disinfectants, etc). In a lab environment, all materials used for cell and/or bacteria cultures are decontaminated via autoclave.
Symptoms:
Status:
confirmed
09.10.2012
Biological Hazard
Zimbabwe
Province of Manicaland, [Buhera, Mutare, Mutasa and Chipinge districts]
Anthrax has killed hundreds of animals mostly in the communal parts of Manicaland within the past two months, and veterinary experts say the risk of the hemorrhagic infection may be greater with drought covering much of the province. Though there were no immediate reports of human deaths in the outbreak, health authorities in Manicaland have recorded several hospitalised cases following the consumption of infected carcasses.
Humans usually get anthrax through direct contact with infected livestock, often when spores get into a cut on the skin or eating infected carcasses. Without treatment, anthrax can be fatal, but early treatment with antibiotics is very effective. Dr Kurai Pride Kapondo, the acting provincial veterinary officer for Manicaland, confirmed the developments, adding that Anthrax cases have frequently been documented in Buhera, Mutare, Mutasa and Chipinge districts. The movement of cattle from these affected districts has been suspended with immediate effect, and those caught moving animals from these affected areas will be penalised because the spread of the disease is partially blamed on illegal animal movements. Natural anthrax is endemic in Zimbabwe where its bacillus spores can live for decades in dry soil and are ingested by animals ruminating for remnants of vegetation in the driest months of September and October. Anthrax outbreaks happen occasionally in livestock herds and wild animals in Zimbabwe, usually in the Gonarezhou area. Animals typically contract the disease by ingesting or inhaling spores that can survive in soil for decades. Once infected, livestock can die within hours. Anthrax bacteria react to drought and other harsh conditions by producing more spores, and experts said conditions are ripe for disease this year. A drought stretches throughout the entirety of Manicaland. “The division of veterinary field services would like to inform the general public that there have been cases of anthrax in Manicaland Province. Anthrax is a notifiable disease and the division of veterinary services must be notified of suspected cases,” said Dr Kapondo, adding that the disease presents itself as sudden death and animals are found with tarry blood oozing from the nose, mouth and anus. “Carcasses bloat and decompose very rapidly. The carcasses of suspected anthrax cases should never be opened and the meat should never be consumed. Should a case of anthrax occur on your farm, you may help to stop the spread of infection by burning or burying dead animals, and disinfecting the place using the most effective disinfectants like quicklime, formalin or caustic soda,” said Dr Kapondo.
The veterinary department is suffering from perennial shortage of vaccines and farmers are being encouraged to purchase their own vaccines.
Biohazard name:
Anthrax
Biohazard level:
4/4 Hazardous
Biohazard desc.:
Viruses and bacteria that cause severe to fatal disease in humans, and for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, H5N1(bird flu), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus, hantaviruses, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and other hemorrhagic or unidentified diseases. When dealing with biological hazards at this level the use of a Hazmat suit and a self-contained oxygen supply is mandatory. The entrance and exit of a Level Four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, autonomous detection system, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a Biosafety Level 4 (P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.
A chemical leak at a plant in Gumi, S Korea, about 10 km from US army base Camp Carroll, killed five people and injured 18 others 27 September but details of the extent of the damage are only now becoming clear, with officials declaring it a disaster area Monday 8 October. People living within one kilometre of the plant were evacuated and 3,000 people are reported to have been sickened by the hydrofluoric acid leak, reports RT. The area southeast of the capital Seoul is known as Koreaâs Silicon Valley.
A power outage in the Lower Valley left 13,800 customers without electricity and numerous intersections without working traffic lights. The outage began around 2:16 p.m. and was restored by 3:06 p.m., according to El Paso Electric officials. Police responded to multiple traffic-related calls in the affect area. Officials said the outage affected the Border Highway area all the way to the Yarbrough Drive exit. The cause of the outage is still unknown, but officials said it has something to do with equipment failure at the Ascarate substation. The cause of the outage is unknown, and according to the outage map, repairs may be completed within three hours.
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An earthquake early Monday centered in Beverly Hills was upgraded from to 3.2 to 3.3. and was felt around Los Angeles, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The temblor occurred at 3:26 a.m.
According to the USGS, the epicenter was one mile from West Hollywood, two miles from Century City and eight miles from Los Angeles Civic Center.
The USGS “Do You Feel It” site said the quake was most strongly felt on the Westside but also in the South Bay, downtown L.A. area and the San Fernando Valley.
In the past 10 days, there has been one earthquake magnitude 3.0 and greater centered nearby.
JAKARTA—A strong 6.4-magnitude earthquake struck off the Indonesian resort island of Bali early on Tuesday, but there was no tsunami warning and no immediate reports of damage or injuries.
The quake’s epicentre was at a shallow depth of eight kilometers (five miles), the US Geological Survey said, putting it 278 kilometers south of Denpasar, on Bali. The quake hit at 2:23 am (1823 GMT Monday).
Indonesia sits on the Pacific “Ring of Fire” where continental plates collide, causing frequent seismic and volcanic activity.
Anak Krakatau in the Sunda Strait, 130 kilometers west of Jakarta, was created by the same tectonic forces that led to the 1883 Krakatoa eruption that killed tens of thousands of people. (Reuters Photo)
Bandarlampung. Volcanic ash from the increasingly active Anak Krakatau has reached a number of areas in Lampung, prompting officials on Monday to issue a warning for local residents and tourists.
“The ash was carried by wind from the southeast to the south, reaching Bandarlampung,” Nurhuda, who heads the observation and information section of the Meteorology, Climatology and Geophysics Agency (BMKG) in Lampung, said according to state news agency Antara.
Nurhuda said the ash fell over several subdistricts in Bandarlampung, about 130 kilometers away from Anak Krakatau.
“It is rather unusual for the dust to be this thick,” said Juniardi, a resident of Bandarlampung who complained that the falling dust was also hampering visibility.
Officials warned that the ask posed health hazards and asked local residents to wear masks when going outdoors or driving motorcycles.
“We also advise fishermen and tourists not to come within a radius of 3 kilometers of Anak Krakatau. The thick plumes of smoke sent off by Krakatau contain toxic material that is hazardous for your health,” said Andi Suhardi, head of the Anak Krakatau observation post in Hargo Pancuran village.
A report from the volcanology office in Bandung shows that the activities of Anak Krakatau has been on the rise over the past few days, reaching almost 90 eruptions per day.
Nurhuda said the report showed the volcano spewed red hot lava up to 300 meters above its peak. “More than 100 volcanic quakes and tremors have been recorded,” he added.
Anak Krakatau, or child or Krakatau, about 130 kilometers west of Jakarta, was created by the same tectonic forces that led to the 1883 Krakatoa eruption that killed tens of thousands of people.
A new phase of activity has started at Krakatau volcano. A large explosion occurred early today and produced an ash plume that reached 14,000 ft (4.2 km) according to Darwin VAAC who first observed it at 01:32 GMT. Ash fall has reached Lampung and over several subdistricts in Bandarlampung, at about 130 kilometers distance. Authorities have issued a warning for local residents and tourists not to approach the volcano. “It is rather unusual for the dust to be this thick,” said Juniardi, a resident of Bandarlampung who complained that the falling dust was also hampering visibility, the Jakarta Globe writes. According to the news article, the activity of Anak Krakatau has been on the rise over the past few days, reaching almost 90 eruptions per day. Nurhuda said the report showed the volcano spewed red hot lava up to 300 meters above its peak. “More than 100 volcanic quakes and tremors have been recorded,” he added.
Unusually fierce storms swept through Malta on Monday, killing one man and dropping more rain on the Mediterranean island in two hours than its normal monthly average for September. The first storm triggered floods that swept away a man who had abandoned his car. Police said the man managed to make it to higher ground. Another man working in a field was fatally struck by lightning, however, as a second storm battered Malta in the afternoon. The storms caused substantial damage across the small Mediterranean archipelago, which includes the main island and sister islands of Gozo and Comino, with cars overturned, trees uprooted, houses flooded and walls collapsed. Malta’s meteorological office said 42.4 millimeters (1.67 inches) of rain fell, eclipsing the 40-millimeter average for the month of September.
A fire in the Angeles National Forest north of Glendora has spread to 700 acres since it began about 2:15 p.m. along East Fork Road, according to a spokesman for the U.S. Forest Service. The blaze was moving north toward the Sheep Mountain Wilderness Area, said John Wagner, an assistant public affairs officer with the forest service. An evacuation was underway at a mobile home park in the vicinity of the fire, Wagner said. He did not know how many residents had been evacuated. There were no reports of casualties or property damage. Wagner said seven air tankers from various agencies were battling the blaze. Fifteen engine companies from the Los Angeles County Fire Department were also fighting the fire, a spokesman said.
NEW ORLEANS — Tens of thousands of customers remained in the dark Monday in Louisiana and Mississippi, nearly a week after Isaac inundated the Gulf Coast with a deluge that still has some low-lying areas under water.
Most of those were in Louisiana, where utilities reported more than 100,000 people without power. Thousands also were without power in Mississippi and Arkansas.
President Barack Obama visited Monday, a day ahead of the Democratic National Convention, and walked around storm damage in St. John the Baptist Parish, where subdivisions were soaked in water from Isaac.
“I know it’s a mess,” Obama said as he approached a resident in the Ridgewood neighborhood. “But we’re here to help.”
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney visited the state Friday.
In St. John the Baptist Parish, residents spent Labor Day dragging waterlogged carpet and furniture to the curb and using bleach and water to clean hopefully to prevent mold.
LaPlace resident Barbara Melton swept mud and debris from her home, which was at one point under 2 feet of water. The garbage, debris and standing water – combined with heat reaching the 90s – created a terrible stench.
“It’s hot, it stinks, but I’m trying to get all this mud and stuff out of my house,” she said.
Melton was grateful for the president’s visit.
“I think it’s awesome to have a president that cares and wants to come out and see what he can do,” Melton, 60, said.
A few houses away, Ed Powell said Isaac was enough to make him question whether to stay.
“I know Louisiana’s a gambling state, but we don’t want to gamble in this method because when you lose this way, you lose a lot.”
Powell said even if Obama comes up with a plan or solution to the flooding problem in his area, time is not on the residents’ side.
“Even if they narrow down what the problem is and begin to resolve the problem, it usually takes years. And between now and whenever, a lot of things can happen,” Powell said.
More than 2,800 people were at shelters in Louisiana, down from around 4,000. State officials were uncertain how many people would eventually need longer-term temporary housing. Kevin Davis, head of the state’s emergency office, said housing would likely include hotels at first, then rental homes as close as possible to their damaged property.
Progress was evident in many places, though lingering flooding remained a problem in low-lying areas.
Crews in the town of Lafitte intentionally breached a levee Sunday night in an effort to help flooding there subside, Jefferson Parish Councilman Chris Roberts told The Times-Picayune.
Much of Plaquemines Parish, a vulnerable finger of land that juts into the Gulf of Mexico, remained under as much as 5 feet of water, Parish President Billy Nungesser said. The Category 1 hurricane walloped the parish, and for many, the damage was worse than that from Katrina in 2005.
Mumbai received a whopping 15 cm average rainfall in 12 hours since 8 a.m. Monday, even as one person was killed and normal life disrupted, officials said. Five people were killed in rain-related incidents in other parts of Maharashtra. Five persons were killed and another four injured when the wall of a temple crashed at Kaundinyapur village in Amravati district. The incident occurred Sunday evening and the bodies of the victims were removed from the debris early Monday. The incessant rains resulted in overflowing of Thane district’s Lake Tansa, a major source of drinking water for the 17 million people of the city, civic official said. Some parts of the city received between four to eight centimetres of rains since Monday morning, raising hopes that the water deficit would be wiped out this year. Several low-lying areas in the city and suburbs were waterlogged, slowing down vehicular movement and causing massive traffic snarls on both the national highways and other major roads. In the evening, five people were injured in a house-collapse in Chunabhatti area of central Mumbai as torrential rains continued. Water logging was reported from parts of Borivli, Kandivli, Jogeshwari, Andheri, Santacruz, Bhandup, Sion, Byculla and some areas in Dadar, Worli, Goregaon and Kurla experienced flooding.
Suburban train services were disrupted on the Western Railway, Central Railway and Harbour Line with average 20-30 minutes delays, hitting office workers and students. The evening peak hour witnessed chaos with a signal failure at Santacruz-CST on the Harbour Line route and trains virtually crawling to their destinations. People commuting from south Mumbai to their homes in the suburbs were stuck en route and reached their destinations only after long delays of one-two hours. Elsewhere in the state, most districts of the coastal Konkan, eastern districts of Vidarbha, northern parts of the state, Marathwada and western Maharasthra were lashed with heavy rains since morning, spelling cheers for the water-starved farming community. Torrential downpour in Thane’s major towns like Kalyan, Dombivli, Vasai, Virar, Palghar and Dahanu led to flooding on the roads with vehicular movements virtually crippled for hours. As a precautionary measure, some schools in the district were closed early to enable students reach their homes safely. Farmers in the parched districts of Marathwada smiled broadly as the region was lashed with rains after a gap of over three weeks and earnestly resumed their farming activities. The weather bureau has forecast similar heavy to very heavy rains over Mumbai and other parts of the state for the next two days.
The Ohio Department of Health announced on Friday that the country’s first known swine flu death took place in their state. A 61-year-old Madison county women was infected with the H3N2v virus and died. She had had direct contact with swine at the Ross County fair and had “multiple other underlying medical conditions” according to the statement.
There are currently 102 cases of the H3N2v virus in Ohio. The age range of patients is between 6 months and 61 years. Most of the patients had only a mild illness, and there have been few hospitalizations in this outbreak.
David Daniels, director of the Ohio Department of Agriculture, said, “swine flu is not uncommon, especially when temperatures have been high, as they have been this summer.” Dr. Tony Forshey, state veterinarian at the Ohio Department of Agriculture said “there are veterinarians in the barn at every fair. Heat-stressed swine are more likely to become ill and contagious.”
This type of flu is only transmissible through contact with live pigs. You cannot get the flu through properly handled and cooked pork. This virus is different from seasonal influenza, but it is transmitted in the same way: through coughing and sneezing by people who are infected. Most of the patients this year have been children.
To protect yourself, wash your hands with soap and water, especially after you’ve been around animals at the fair. Avoid touching eyes, nose, and mouth. Do not drink or eat near animals, and do not bring food into the barns when you visit a fair. And limit time around animals. Young children, pregnant women, the elderly, and those with weakened immune systems should avoid exposure to pigs and swine barns.
If you develop a flu-like illness, with symptoms including fever, tiredness, lack of appetite, coughing, runny nose, sore throat, nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea, see your healthcare provider. And make sure to tell her that you have been in contact with swine or other people who are sick. For questions or help, call the Ohio Department of Agirculture’s Division of Animal Health at 614-728-6220.
The next strong flare could be just around the corner. Sunspot AR1564 is growing rapidly and has developed a ‘beta-gamma’ magnetic field that harbors energy for M-class flares. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory took this picture of the active region during the early hours of Sept. 4th:
NOAA forecasters estimate a 40% chance of M-flares during the next 24 hours. Any eruptions will likely be Earth-directed as the active region is turning toward our planet.
Solar wind
speed: 422.7 km/sec
density: 15.2 protons/cm3 explanation | more data
Updated: Today at 0735 UT
X-ray Solar Flares
6-hr max: C2 0507 UT Sep04
24-hr: C2 0507 UT Sep04 explanation | more data
Updated: Today at: 0700 UT
Daily Sun: 04 Sep 12
Sunspot 1564 is suddenly growing. It has a ‘beta-gamma’ magnetic field that harbors energy for M-class solar flares. Credit: SDO/HMI
Spotless Days Current Stretch: 0 days
2012 total: 0 days (0%)
2011 total: 2 days (<1%)
2010 total: 51 days (14%)
2009 total: 260 days (71%)
Since 2004: 821 days
Typical Solar Min: 486 days
Update 04 Sep 2012
A geomagnetic storm that began on Sept. 3rd when a coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth’s magnetic field is fitfully subsiding. The impact at 1200 UT (5 am PDT) induced significant ground currents in the soil of northern Scandinavia and sparked bright auroras around the Arctic Circle. Ole C. Salomonsen photographed the display over Naimakka, Finland, on Sept. 4th:
“There I was standing all alone deep in the Finish forest, just in awe of this display of light above my head,” says Salomonsen. “This is just one of many images of spectacular auroras I shot on this wonderful night.”
Forty-six students of Government Polytechnic College for Women at Sidhapudur in the heart of Coimbatore city became ill on Monday following suspected food poisoning. They were admitted at two hospitals in the vicinity after they complained of severe vomiting and stomach pain. The students developed discomfort after having dinner at the college hostel cafeteria on Sunday. While 11 of them were admitted at Ramakrishna hospital on Sunday night itself, 35 students were rushed to the Coimbatore Medical College and Hospital (CMCH) at around 8 am on Monday. Seven of them are being kept in the Intensive Care unit at CMCH and Ramakrishna hospital. The doctors attending to the students said that most of them were admitted with complaints of vomiting, diarrhea and stomach pain. They were put on drips and medication. P Sivaprakasam, resident medical officer of CMCH said initial examinations had revealed that the students were suffering from food poisoning. He also said that they had consumed contaminated water. “They are recovering well and will be discharged in a couple of days,” he added.
A Kalpana, a third year student recovering at CMCH said that on Sunday night they were served tomato rice for dinner. For the past week the drinking water supply was not proper. Some students may have consumed contaminated water or it may have been used for cooking,” said another student on conditions of anonymity. “Just a few months ago the students had oragnised a public protest demanding good quality food. The case of food poisoning highlights the grim situation prevailing at the hostel,” she added. The doctors say that students fell ill because of consuming contaminated water. What has happened is unfortunate. We will look into the issue and ensure this does not happen again. Corrective measures will be put in place,” said B Padmini, principal of the college. There are 300 students residing at the hostel. Most hostel students are sports players, she said. “Students may have consumed pipe water instead of the boiled water made available to them. This is despite several reminders to drink only boiled water,” the principal added. Regarding the allegation of inadequate drinking water supply in the past one week, Padmini said that on certain days there was a disruption in supply.
Biohazard name:
Mass. Food Poisoning
Biohazard level:
0/4 —
Biohazard desc.:
This does not included biological hazard category.
Symptoms:
Status:
03.09.2012
Biological Hazard
Kyrgyzstan
Chuy Oblast, [About 20 kilometers of the Kant Air Base]
Russia’s military officials say that efforts to prevent an anthrax epidemic have been increased at a Russian air base in Kyrgyzstan because of an outbreak of anthrax nearby. Officials from Russia’s Central Military District say one of the outbreaks is within 20 kilometers of the Kant Air Base in Kyrgyzstan’s northern region of Chui. He says all military buildings on the base — including apartments for officers and their families — have been disinfected and safety checks on food supplies have been increased. The move was undertaken after Kyrgyz health officials announced last week that several cases of anthrax had been confirmed in Chui and in the southern regions of Jalal-abad and Batken.
Biohazard name:
Anthrax
Biohazard level:
0/4 —
Biohazard desc.:
This does not included biological hazard category.
A wildlife rescue organization says 13 whales have died following a mass stranding off the Scottish coast. British Divers and Marine Life Rescue said Sunday that the mammals were among a group of 26 pilot whales stranded at Pittenweem, in eastern Scotland. Coast guards, volunteer medics, fire crews and police are all also involved in efforts to rescue the 13 still living. But rescue coordinator Gareth Norman said that it was likely more of the whales would die. A further 24 pilot whales from the same pod are currently in shallow water three miles along the coast at Cellardyke.
Scientists and conservationists are once again puzzled over the behaviour of whales – with two different pods of pilot whales beaching themselves this weekend on either side of the Atlantic.
A pod of 26 pilot whales stranded themselves off the coast of Fife in Scotland.
Crowds of on-lookers gathered to watch the massive rescue and relief operation.
13 of the 26 whales did not make it.
And in a strange coincidence… another pod of whales beached themselves along the coast of south-central Florida in the U.S.
This time, 22 pilot whales stranded themselves near Fort Pierce.
VERO BEACH, Fla., Sept. 2 (UPI) — Wildlife experts suspect an ailing alpha whale caused a pod of short-fin pilot whales to beach themselves in Florida this weekend.
Seventeen of the 22 mammals died in the surf at Avalon Beach State Park in St. Lucie County and five juveniles were taken to a rescue facility at nearby Florida Atlantic University, but were not expected to survive.
Blair Mase, who specializes in the study of whale stranding for the U.S. government, told TCPalm.com the tragedy was probably linked to the pod leader.
“This species has a tight social structure,” said Mase, a regional coordinator for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. “Typically, they stay together as a group. So if one animal is sick, they all come ashore.”
Hundreds of people on the area either watched the stranding unfold. Many tried to help out by throwing wet towels on the whales to protect them from the sun, TCPalm.com said.
Mase it would not have done much good to push the whales off the sand. “If you push them into the water, they’ll just keep coming back and stranding themselves again,” she said.
[In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes 'FAIR USE' of any such copyrighted material.]
The August 31, 2012 M 7.6 earthquake off the east coast of the Philippines occurred as a result of reverse faulting within the oceanic lithosphere of the Philippines Sea plate. The preliminary location of the earthquake indicates this is an intraplate event, 50 or more kilometers to the east of the subduction zone plate boundary between the Philippine Sea and Sunda plates. At the latitude of the earthquake, the Philippine Sea plate moves west-northwest at a velocity of approximately 100 mm/yr.
While this region of the Philippines experiences moderate-to-large earthquakes fairly frequently – there have been approximately 40 events of M6 and above over the past 40 years, within 250 km of the August 31 2012 earthquake – large events outboard of the subduction zone are unusual. While several moderate-sized events have occurred in this intraplate region, most have been the result of normal faulting within the shallower oceanic lithosphere, rather than deeper reverse faulting like August 31 2012 event. The largest nearby event regardless of mechanism was the October 1975 M 7.6 earthquake, approximately 200 km to the north of the August 31 2012 event.
For information on aftershocks within the region of this earthquake, see this map.
Seismotectonics of the Philippine Sea and Vicinity
The Philippine Sea plate is bordered by the larger Pacific and Eurasia plates and the smaller Sunda plate. The Philippine Sea plate is unusual in that its borders are nearly all zones of plate convergence. The Pacific plate is subducted into the mantle, south of Japan, beneath the Izu-Bonin and Mariana island arcs, which extend more than 3,000 km along the eastern margin of the Philippine Sea plate. This subduction zone is characterized by rapid plate convergence and high-level seismicity extending to depths of over 600 km. In spite of this extensive zone of plate convergence, the plate interface has been associated with few great (M>8.0) ‘megathrust’ earthquakes. This low seismic energy release is thought to result from weak coupling along the plate interface (Scholz and Campos, 1995). These convergent plate margins are also associated with unusual zones of back-arc extension (along with resulting seismic activity) that decouple the volcanic island arcs from the remainder of the Philippine Sea Plate (Karig et al., 1978; Klaus et al., 1992).
South of the Mariana arc, the Pacific plate is subducted beneath the Yap Islands along the Yap trench. The long zone of Pacific plate subduction at the eastern margin of the Philippine Sea Plate is responsible for the generation of the deep Izu-Bonin, Mariana, and Yap trenches as well as parallel chains of islands and volcanoes, typical of circum-pacific island arcs. Similarly, the northwestern margin of the Philippine Sea plate is subducting beneath the Eurasia plate along a convergent zone, extending from southern Honshu to the northeastern coast of Taiwan, manifested by the Ryukyu Islands and the Nansei-Shoto (Ryukyu) trench. The Ryukyu Subduction Zone is associated with a similar zone of back-arc extension, the Okinawa Trough. At Taiwan, the plate boundary is characterized by a zone of arc-continent collision, whereby the northern end of the Luzon island arc is colliding with the buoyant crust of the Eurasia continental margin offshore China.
Along its western margin, the Philippine Sea plate is associated with a zone of oblique convergence with the Sunda Plate. This highly active convergent plate boundary extends along both sides the Philippine Islands, from Luzon in the north to the Celebes Islands in the south. The tectonic setting of the Philippines is unusual in several respects: it is characterized by opposite-facing subduction systems on its east and west sides; the archipelago is cut by a major transform fault, the Philippine Fault; and the arc complex itself is marked by active volcanism, faulting, and high seismic activity. Subduction of the Philippine Sea Plate occurs at the eastern margin of the archipelago along the Philippine Trench and its northern extension, the East Luzon Trough. The East Luzon Trough is thought to be an unusual example of a subduction zone in the process of formation, as the Philippine Trench system gradually extends northward (Hamburger et al., 1983). On the west side of Luzon, the Sunda Plate subducts eastward along a series of trenches, including the Manila Trench in the north, the smaller less well-developed Negros Trench in the central Philippines, and the Sulu and Cotabato trenches in the south (Cardwell et al., 1980). At its northern and southern terminations, subduction at the Manila Trench is interrupted by arc-continent collision, between the northern Philippine arc and the Eurasian continental margin at Taiwan and between the Sulu-Borneo Block and Luzon at the island of Mindoro. The Philippine fault, which extends over 1,200 km within the Philippine arc, is seismically active. The fault has been associated with major historical earthquakes, including the destructive M7.6 Luzon earthquake of 1990 (Yoshida and Abe, 1992). A number of other active intra-arc fault systems are associated with high seismic activity, including the Cotabato Fault and the Verde Passage–Sibuyan Sea Fault (Galgana et al., 2007).
Relative plate motion vectors near the Philippines (about 80 mm/yr) is oblique to the plate boundary along the two plate margins of central Luzon, where it is partitioned into orthogonal plate convergence along the trenches and nearly pure translational motion along the Philippine Fault (Barrier et al., 1991). Profiles B and C reveal evidence of opposing inclined seismic zones at intermediate depths (roughly 70-300 km) and complex tectonics at the surface along the Philippine Fault.
Several relevant tectonic elements, plate boundaries and active volcanoes, provide a context for the seismicity presented on the main map. The plate boundaries are most accurate along the axis of the trenches and more diffuse or speculative in the South China Sea and Lesser Sunda Islands. The active volcanic arcs (Siebert and Simkin, 2002) follow the Izu, Volcano, Mariana, and Ryukyu island chains and the main Philippine islands parallel to the Manila, Negros, Cotabato, and Philippine trenches.
Seismic activity along the boundaries of the Philippine Sea Plate (Allen et al., 2009) has produced 7 great (M>8.0) earthquakes and 250 large (M>7) events. Among the most destructive events were the 1923 Kanto, the 1948 Fukui and the 1995 Kobe (Japan) earthquakes (99,000, 5,100, and 6,400 casualties, respectively), the 1935 and the 1999 Chi-Chi (Taiwan) earthquakes (3,300 and 2,500 casualties, respectively), and the 1976 M7.6 Moro Gulf and 1990 M7.6 Luzon (Philippines) earthquakes (7,100 and 2,400 casualties, respectively). There have also been a number of tsunami-generating events in the region, including the Moro Gulf earthquake, whose tsunami resulted in more than 5000 deaths.
The August 31, 2012 M 7.6 earthquake off the east coast of the Philippines occurred as a result of reverse faulting within the oceanic lithosphere of the Philippines Sea plate. The preliminary location of the earthquake indicates this is an intraplate event, 50 or more kilometers to the east of the subduction zone plate boundary between the Philippine Sea and Sunda plates. At the latitude of the earthquake, the Philippine Sea plate moves west-northwest at a velocity of approximately 100 mm/yr with respect to the Sunda plate.
While this region of the Philippines experiences moderate-to-large earthquakes fairly frequently – there have been approximately 40 events of M6 and above over the past 40 years, within 250 km of the August 31 2012 earthquake – large events outboard of the subduction zone are unusual. While several moderate-sized events have occurred in this intraplate region, most have been the result of normal faulting within the shallower oceanic lithosphere, rather than deeper reverse faulting like August 31 2012 event. The largest nearby event regardless of mechanism was the October 1975 M 7.6 earthquake, approximately 200 km to the north of the August 31 2012 event.
For information on aftershocks within the region of this earthquake, see this map.
Seismotectonics of the Philippine Sea and Vicinity
The Philippine Sea plate is bordered by the larger Pacific and Eurasia plates and the smaller Sunda plate. The Philippine Sea plate is unusual in that its borders are nearly all zones of plate convergence. The Pacific plate is subducted into the mantle, south of Japan, beneath the Izu-Bonin and Mariana island arcs, which extend more than 3,000 km along the eastern margin of the Philippine Sea plate. This subduction zone is characterized by rapid plate convergence and high-level seismicity extending to depths of over 600 km. In spite of this extensive zone of plate convergence, the plate interface has been associated with few great (M>8.0) ‘megathrust’ earthquakes. This low seismic energy release is thought to result from weak coupling along the plate interface (Scholz and Campos, 1995). These convergent plate margins are also associated with unusual zones of back-arc extension (along with resulting seismic activity) that decouple the volcanic island arcs from the remainder of the Philippine Sea Plate (Karig et al., 1978; Klaus et al., 1992).
South of the Mariana arc, the Pacific plate is subducted beneath the Yap Islands along the Yap trench. The long zone of Pacific plate subduction at the eastern margin of the Philippine Sea Plate is responsible for the generation of the deep Izu-Bonin, Mariana, and Yap trenches as well as parallel chains of islands and volcanoes, typical of circum-pacific island arcs. Similarly, the northwestern margin of the Philippine Sea plate is subducting beneath the Eurasia plate along a convergent zone, extending from southern Honshu to the northeastern coast of Taiwan, manifested by the Ryukyu Islands and the Nansei-Shoto (Ryukyu) trench. The Ryukyu Subduction Zone is associated with a similar zone of back-arc extension, the Okinawa Trough. At Taiwan, the plate boundary is characterized by a zone of arc-continent collision, whereby the northern end of the Luzon island arc is colliding with the buoyant crust of the Eurasia continental margin offshore China.
Along its western margin, the Philippine Sea plate is associated with a zone of oblique convergence with the Sunda Plate. This highly active convergent plate boundary extends along both sides the Philippine Islands, from Luzon in the north to the Celebes Islands in the south. The tectonic setting of the Philippines is unusual in several respects: it is characterized by opposite-facing subduction systems on its east and west sides; the archipelago is cut by a major transform fault, the Philippine Fault; and the arc complex itself is marked by active volcanism, faulting, and high seismic activity. Subduction of the Philippine Sea Plate occurs at the eastern margin of the archipelago along the Philippine Trench and its northern extension, the East Luzon Trough. The East Luzon Trough is thought to be an unusual example of a subduction zone in the process of formation, as the Philippine Trench system gradually extends northward (Hamburger et al., 1983). On the west side of Luzon, the Sunda Plate subducts eastward along a series of trenches, including the Manila Trench in the north, the smaller less well-developed Negros Trench in the central Philippines, and the Sulu and Cotabato trenches in the south (Cardwell et al., 1980). At its northern and southern terminations, subduction at the Manila Trench is interrupted by arc-continent collision, between the northern Philippine arc and the Eurasian continental margin at Taiwan and between the Sulu-Borneo Block and Luzon at the island of Mindoro. The Philippine fault, which extends over 1,200 km within the Philippine arc, is seismically active. The fault has been associated with major historical earthquakes, including the destructive M7.6 Luzon earthquake of 1990 (Yoshida and Abe, 1992). A number of other active intra-arc fault systems are associated with high seismic activity, including the Cotabato Fault and the Verde Passage–Sibuyan Sea Fault (Galgana et al., 2007).
Relative plate motion vectors near the Philippines (about 80 mm/yr) is oblique to the plate boundary along the two plate margins of central Luzon, where it is partitioned into orthogonal plate convergence along the trenches and nearly pure translational motion along the Philippine Fault (Barrier et al., 1991). Profiles B and C reveal evidence of opposing inclined seismic zones at intermediate depths (roughly 70-300 km) and complex tectonics at the surface along the Philippine Fault.
Several relevant tectonic elements, plate boundaries and active volcanoes, provide a context for the seismicity presented on the main map. The plate boundaries are most accurate along the axis of the trenches and more diffuse or speculative in the South China Sea and Lesser Sunda Islands. The active volcanic arcs (Siebert and Simkin, 2002) follow the Izu, Volcano, Mariana, and Ryukyu island chains and the main Philippine islands parallel to the Manila, Negros, Cotabato, and Philippine trenches.
Seismic activity along the boundaries of the Philippine Sea Plate (Allen et al., 2009) has produced 7 great (M>8.0) earthquakes and 250 large (M>7) events. Among the most destructive events were the 1923 Kanto, the 1948 Fukui and the 1995 Kobe (Japan) earthquakes (99,000, 5,100, and 6,400 casualties, respectively), the 1935 and the 1999 Chi-Chi (Taiwan) earthquakes (3,300 and 2,500 casualties, respectively), and the 1976 M7.6 Moro Gulf and 1990 M7.6 Luzon (Philippines) earthquakes (7,100 and 2,400 casualties, respectively). There have also been a number of tsunami-generating events in the region, including the Moro Gulf earthquake, whose tsunami resulted in more than 5000 deaths.
A 7.6 earthquake struck off the Philippine coast on Friday, triggering landslides that killed at least one person and a small tsunami that hit the eastern part of the archipelago, authorities said. The quake struck at a depth of 34 kilometres (21 miles) in the Pacific Ocean about 140 kilometres from the Philippines, leading to tsunami warnings across its east coast and as far away as Indonesia, Japan and Papua New Guinea. A series of small waves ranging from 16-centimetres (six-inch) to 50 centimetres hit the eastern Philippines about two hours after the quake, according to local authorities, but there were no reports of major damage. The US Pacific Tsunami Warning Center shortly afterwards lifted its tsunami warnings for the Philippines and Indonesia. It had earlier cancelled similar warnings for Japan, Taiwan and several Pacific islands. The warnings led to a burst of terror for residents along the east coast of the Philippines, many of whom were without electricity because power lines had been cut during the earthquake that hit at 8:47 pm (1247 GMT). Leticia Amos, 35, a government employee, said hundreds of families on Samar island rushed to a hillside area, carrying their belongings as soon as the alert was raised.”It is very dark, there is no electricity and everyove is panicking,” she said. “Our place is on a hilly portion along the highway, and hundreds of people from low lying bayside areas rushed here.” The quake shook large areas of the east, and one person was confirmed killed when a landslide engulfed her home in Cagayan de Oro City. “There’s a 60-year-old woman who died and a five-year-old girl who was injured. There was a small landslide,” civil defence chief Benito Ramos said on DZMM radio. “The quake occurred amid strong rain, so the earth shook loose and there was a landslide.” Paula Daza, the governor of northern Samar province, one of the areas closest to where the quake struck, said there were reports of damage to infrastructure. “Some cracks appeared on concrete roads, and at the base of at least one bridge,” he said. Sol Matugas, the governor of another eastern region, Surigao del Norte, said on DZMM radio that the quake had severely shaken homes. “We were rather frightened. For the first time, we saw objects falling out of our cabinets,” he said. The USGS had initially reported the quake as having a magnitude of 7.9, but revised it to 7.6.
The Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) reported in its website that the quake’s epicenter was located at 112 kilometers east of Guiuan, Eastern Samar.
The quake’s origin is tectonic and it has a depth of 10 kilometers.
It was also located at 175 kilometers northeast of Surigao, 187 kilometers east southeast of Tacloban, Leyte and 749 kilometers southeast of Manila, the US Geological Survey said in its latest bulletin.
The USGS issued a tsunami warning in the Philippines, as well as in Indonesia, Taiwan, Japan and Guam.
Phivolcs Director Renato Solidum advised residents in Surigao del Norte, Eastern Samar, Southern Leyte and Bicol to be on alert for possible aftershocks.
He also advised those living in coastal villages in these areas to evacuate due to the tsunami warning.
Southern Leyte Governor Damian Mercado said in a radio interview that he told all town mayors in the province to evacuate all families living in coastal areas. Evacuation is also ongoing in Eastern Samar and Surigao.
No damage has been reported as of this posting Friday. (Sunnex)
000
WEPA40 PHEB 311454
TSUPAC
TSUNAMI BULLETIN NUMBER 004
PACIFIC TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER/NOAA/NWS
ISSUED AT 1454Z 31 AUG 2012
THIS BULLETIN APPLIES TO AREAS WITHIN AND BORDERING THE PACIFIC
OCEAN AND ADJACENT SEAS...EXCEPT ALASKA...BRITISH COLUMBIA...
WASHINGTON...OREGON AND CALIFORNIA.
ADDITIONAL SEA LEVEL READINGS INCLUDED. WARNING IS CANCELLED.
... TSUNAMI WARNING CANCELLATION ...
THE TSUNAMI WARNING AND/OR WATCH ISSUED BY THE PACIFIC TSUNAMI
WARNING CENTER IS NOW CANCELLED FOR
INDONESIA / PHILIPPINES / BELAU
THIS BULLETIN IS ISSUED AS ADVICE TO GOVERNMENT AGENCIES. ONLY
NATIONAL AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT AGENCIES HAVE THE AUTHORITY TO MAKE
DECISIONS REGARDING THE OFFICIAL STATE OF ALERT IN THEIR AREA AND
ANY ACTIONS TO BE TAKEN IN RESPONSE.
AN EARTHQUAKE HAS OCCURRED WITH THESE PRELIMINARY PARAMETERS
ORIGIN TIME - 1248Z 31 AUG 2012
COORDINATES - 10.9 NORTH 127.1 EAST
DEPTH - 33 KM
LOCATION - PHILIPPINE ISLANDS REGION
MAGNITUDE - 7.6
MEASUREMENTS OR REPORTS OF TSUNAMI WAVE ACTIVITY
GAUGE LOCATION LAT LON TIME AMPL PER
------------------- ----- ------ ----- --------------- -----
MALAKAL KOROR PW 7.3N 134.5E 1447Z 0.01M / 0.0FT 10MIN
DART 52404 20.9N 132.3E 1418Z 0.01M / 0.0FT 10MIN
DAVAO PH 7.1N 125.6E 1350Z 0.03M / 0.1FT 32MIN
DART 52405 12.9N 132.3E 1333Z 0.03M / 0.1FT 10MIN
LEGASPI PH 13.1N 123.8E 1343Z 0.03M / 0.1FT 14MIN
LAT - LATITUDE (N-NORTH, S-SOUTH)
LON - LONGITUDE (E-EAST, W-WEST)
TIME - TIME OF THE MEASUREMENT (Z IS UTC IS GREENWICH TIME)
AMPL - TSUNAMI AMPLITUDE MEASURED RELATIVE TO NORMAL SEA LEVEL.
IT IS ...NOT... CREST-TO-TROUGH WAVE HEIGHT.
VALUES ARE GIVEN IN BOTH METERS(M) AND FEET(FT).
PER - PERIOD OF TIME IN MINUTES(MIN) FROM ONE WAVE TO THE NEXT.
NOTE - DART MEASUREMENTS ARE FROM THE DEEP OCEAN AND THEY
ARE GENERALLY MUCH SMALLER THAN WOULD BE COASTAL
MEASUREMENTS AT SIMILAR LOCATIONS.
EVALUATION
SEA LEVEL READINGS INDICATE A TSUNAMI WAS GENERATED. IT MAY HAVE
BEEN DESTRUCTIVE ALONG COASTS NEAR THE EARTHQUAKE EPICENTER. FOR
THOSE AREAS - WHEN NO MAJOR WAVES ARE OBSERVED FOR TWO HOURS
AFTER THE ESTIMATED TIME OF ARRIVAL OR DAMAGING WAVES HAVE NOT
OCCURRED FOR AT LEAST TWO HOURS THEN LOCAL AUTHORITIES CAN ASSUME
THE THREAT IS PASSED. DANGER TO BOATS AND COASTAL STRUCTURES CAN
CONTINUE FOR SEVERAL HOURS DUE TO RAPID CURRENTS. AS LOCAL
CONDITIONS CAN CAUSE A WIDE VARIATION IN TSUNAMI WAVE ACTION THE
ALL CLEAR DETERMINATION MUST BE MADE BY LOCAL AUTHORITIES.
NO TSUNAMI THREAT EXISTS FOR OTHER COASTAL AREAS IN THE PACIFIC
ALTHOUGH SOME OTHER AREAS MAY EXPERIENCE SMALL SEA LEVEL CHANGES.
THE TSUNAMI WARNING IS NOW CANCELLED FOR ALL AREAS COVERED BY
THIS CENTER.
THIS WILL BE THE FINAL BULLETIN ISSUED FOR THIS EVENT UNLESS
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION BECOMES AVAILABLE.
THE JAPAN METEOROLOGICAL AGENCY MAY ALSO ISSUE TSUNAMI MESSAGES
FOR THIS EVENT TO COUNTRIES IN THE NORTHWEST PACIFIC AND SOUTH
CHINA SEA REGION. IN CASE OF CONFLICTING INFORMATION... THE
MORE CONSERVATIVE INFORMATION SHOULD BE USED FOR SAFETY.
THE WEST COAST/ALASKA TSUNAMI WARNING CENTER WILL ISSUE PRODUCTS
FOR ALASKA...BRITISH COLUMBIA...WASHINGTON...OREGON...CALIFORNIA.
Some unrest is going on at Reclus volcano in southern Chile, located between Aguilera and Monte Burney in Patagonia, the Eruptions Blog writes:
“Over the summer, earthquakes began to be felt in towns in the region of the volcano and a potential for new activity from the Reclus has prompted geologists to visit the volcano later this spring (southern hemisphere). Interestingly, one article mentions that an overflight of the volcano in 2008 spotted cracks on the glaciers that cover the volcano along with traces of ash. However, the direct connection between the seismicity in Patagonia and Reclus is still tenuous, so further observations of the remote volcano will need to be done.”
Reclus has had at least 4 historical eruptions around, 1908, 1879, and in 1869. Although these were small, the volcano has produced larger explosive eruptions in the past and should be closely monitored.
Elevated Volcanic Activity and Information Releases
Friday, Aug 31, 2012 at 20:30:59 PDT.
The following U.S. volcanoes are known to be above normal background (elevated unrest or eruptions) or have shown activity that warranted an Information Release (for example, an earthquake swarm).
Times are local to the volcano and in military format.
Volcano Alert Levels & Aviation Color Codes defined at http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/activity/alertsystem.
Little Sitkin Alert Level=ADVISORY. Aviation Color Code=YELLOW. As of Aug 31, 2012, 15:35 AKDT Anomalous seismicity that began on August 29 gradually decreases since 06:00 AKDT (14:00 UTC) August 31, 2012.
(Change to current status occurred on Aug 30, 2012 04:23 AKDT from Alert Level UNASSIGNED and Aviation Color Code UNASSIGNED ) For more information see http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/activity/archiveupdate.php?noticeid=7691
Iliamna Alert Level=ADVISORY. Aviation Color Code=YELLOW. As of Aug 31, 2012, 15:35 AKDT Clouds obscured satellite and webcam view of Iliamna during the past 24 hours. Seismicity remains slightly above background.
(Change to current status occurred on Mar 9, 2012 13:07 AKDT from Alert Level NORMAL and Aviation Color Code GREEN ) For more information see http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/activity/archiveupdate.php?noticeid=7690
Cleveland Alert Level=WATCH. Aviation Color Code=ORANGE. As of Aug 31, 2012, 15:35 AKDT Satellite imagery indicates that as of August 27, 2012, the summit crater of Cleveland is a tephra-covered funnel surrounding a central vent containing no dome.
(Change to current status occurred on Jun 19, 2012 15:06 AKDT from Alert Level ADVISORY and Aviation Color Code YELLOW ) For more information see http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/activity/archiveupdate.php?noticeid=7689
Pagan Alert Level=ADVISORY. Aviation Color Code=YELLOW. As of Aug 31, 2012, 10:09 ChST Low-level unrest. YELLOW/ADVISORY. Persistent steam/gas plume.
(Change to current status occurred on Oct 6, 2011 14:21 ChST from Alert Level UNASSIGNED and Aviation Color Code UNASSIGNED ) For more information see http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/activity/archiveupdate.php?noticeid=7686
Kilauea Alert Level=WATCH. Aviation Color Code=ORANGE. As of Aug 31, 2012, 08:16 HST DI deflation and lava lake dropping slowed; new pit craters in Pu`u `O`o Crater and barely active lava flows to the SE; no ocean entry; gas emissions elevated.
(Change to current status occurred on Mar 9, 2011 19:45 HST from Alert Level WARNING and Aviation Color Code RED ) For more information see http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/activity/archiveupdate.php?noticeid=7688
People stand on large hexagonal columns of volcanic rock, southeast of Hong Kong in this handout photo released August 30, 2012.
Some 140 million years after it erupted and then toppled into the sea, an ancient supervolcano in Hong Kong is making headlines.
The government announced Thursday that it had located the supervolcano—the first discovery of its kind in southeastern China—while surveying in the area in southeastern Hong Kong. The volcano is now extinct and poses no threat to Hong Kong.
What makes the volcano super? When it last exploded 140 million years ago, it would have darkened the sky with 312 cubic miles of ash, enough to blanket all of Hong Kong, said Denise Tang of the government’s civil engineering & development department, which discovered the volcano. About 50 other such supervolcanos are known to exist around the world, she said.
The original base of Hong Kong’s supervolcano would have measured about 11 miles in diameter, and the vista of vaulting, hexagonal rock columns and small islands it left behind remain gorgeous reminders of its dramatic geologic past. They can be toured by boat, but Ms. Tang was quick to warn any would-be tourists to use caution before making any expeditions.
“Although it’s very beautiful,” she said, “there’s no facilities, no pier facilities, so we actually do not recommend people try to land on the island.”
Remnants of an ancient super volcano have been discovered near Hong Kong.
According to experts, the last eruption of the volcano occurred in the Mesozoic Era at the turn of the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods about 140 million years ago.
The diameter of the gigantic crater spans 18 kilometers.
Scientists have confirmed the earlier hypothesis that the volcano settled down many years ago and assured Hong Kong residents that it won’t erupt again.
Seismologists say a cluster of earthquakes has been detected at a remote volcano in Alaska’s western Aleutian Islands. The Alaska Volcano Observatory says the quakes began Wednesday evening at Little Sitkin Volcano and are continuing as of Thursday morning. No eruption has been detected. Scientist in charge John Power says there is no direct link to the swarm of earthquakes at Little Sitkin and a cluster of quakes that shook California’s Imperial County earlier this week. Powers says Little Sitkin is located on an uninhabited island and is far from any populated areas. He says the seismic activity is unusual for Little Sitkin, whose last eruption possibly in the early 1900s is questionable. Powers says the concern about an eruption would be the possible threat posed to aircraft.
A huge wildfire is approaching the wealthy resort of Marbella on Spain’s Costa del Sol, where the authorities have evacuated thousands of people. Flames reached the Elviria area on the edge of Marbella early on Friday. About 1,000 people have been evacuated from the edge of Marbella, about 3,300 from Ojen and others from a camp site at Alpujata, Spanish media report. They include at least 300 British expats sent to evacuation centres, the UK embassy said. Marbella is famous for its up-market hotels and villas – it is a favourite haunt of wealthy foreigners. Overnight the fire spread rapidly through a 12km (eight-mile) coastal strip, not far from holiday resorts. Two people have suffered serious burns and some homes have been engulfed by the fire. The Costa del Sol is one of Spain’s most popular holiday destinations and home to a large British expatriate community. The British embassy says it is working closely with the Spanish authorities and consular staff have been deployed to assist those affected.
Lake Tangipahoa, a 450 to 500-acre lake at Percy Quinn State Park just north of the Mississippi state line, was swollen from Isaac’s rain, undermining a dam that, if it failed, would release the body of water into the Tangipahoa River that meanders down the parish’s length to Lake Pontchartrain. “That’s going to inundate an already flooded river,” said National Guard Col. Rodney Painting, the incoming commander of the Guard’s 225th Engineer Brigade who started his day helping oversee the evacuation of flooded areas in LaPlace and would end it in his native Tangipahoa helping oversee what appears to be the largest such effort in the state since Isaac made landfall Tuesday. Authorities in Mississippi tried to ease the pressure by releasing some of the water, an effort said to be working. Louisiana officials are taking no chances.State and parish officials called a mandatory evacuation for communities from Kentwood to Robert. If the dam breaks, the National Guard will go into the affected communities with high-water vehicles and small boats, “that we can get through the flooded woods or streets if we have to,” said Painter, who during the Isaac state of emergency has helped coordinate evacuation sites at Zephyr Field in Metairie and in Slidell before moving to Laplace and Amite. In the “controlled release” using spillways, the water from the lake flooded out into a sparsely inhabited area of Mississippi on Thursday afternoon, relieving pressure on a dam scoured by Hurricane Isaac that threatened to push water levels in the Tangipahoa River up to 17 feet in Louisiana. Officials believe the controlled release of waters through emergency spillways will allow the water level to stabilize and lessen pressure on the dam until crews can breach the edge of Tangipahoa Lake near McComb and drain another 8 feet of water.While the release is expected to protect communities on the north shore, officials in Mississippi said about 20 homes on their side of the state line will be flooded out and emergency crews conducted a door-to-door effort to warn residents to leave their homes. Meanwhile, a more massive effort was occurring miles downriver, as National Guard units and other state assets attempted to get 40,000 to 60,000 people out of their homes. Though the water level in the lake was dropping and Mississippi officials downplayed the seriousness of the dam’s condition, Gov. Bobby Jindal continued to urge residents to leave potential flood zones in Tangipahoa Parish Thursday night. “The worse thing that could happen is that people get a false sense of confidence and then if there be a breach overnight it would be a lot harder for people to evacuate,” Jindal said. From the Florida Parishes Arena, troops drove school buses to collection points, where they’re driving evacuees to evacuation shelters set up at schools. School buses have been brought in from as far as Avoylles Parish and Terrebonne Parish, each driven by soldiers. “I’ve already got buses on the road full of people,” said Lt. Col. Vincent Tallo.
About 200 coaches and school buses are being rushed to Tangipahoa, said First Sgt. Rufus Jones of 3rd Battalion, 156th Infantry Regiment, a Guard combat unit whose soldiers, all armed with M4 rifles, waited in the arena for missions that would likely would include security details. By Thursday night, Tallo said he expected 300 National Guard troops in the parish, assisting the evacuation. The National Guard received the mission at 10 a.m., Thursday, said Maj. Scott Slaven, who commands the 205th Engineer Battalion in Bogalusa. Troops and equipment are staged on both sides of the Tangipahoa River, Slaven said. At Pontchatoula High School, Darryl Holliday of Kajun Kettle Foods Inc., which has a state contract to feed evacuees, was told to brace for 2,000 people. At 6:30 p.m., none of the evacuees had reached the school on Louisiana 22. Holliday said he was told that 40 people were en route. Painter said the plan calls for keeping evacuees in Tangipahoa Parish. At the Florida Parishes Arena, employees of the state Department of Children and Family Services prepared to account for the evacuees with forms, in part designed to identify families.
The damage to dam prompted Parish President Gordon Burgess to order mandatory evacuations along the Tangipahoa River, which were carried out with the assistance of the state and National Guard units. The first reports of problems with the dam came into emergency operations officials at 8 a.m., when crews noticed two “sloughs” where dirt was sliding down the sides of the earthen structure, said Greg Flynn, spokesman for the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency. Those sloughs are the first sign of a problem with the integrity of a dam, Flynn said. The damage was caused by rain from Hurricane Isaac, which raised the water level of the recreational fishing lake by several feet, said Richard Coghlan, Emergency Coordinator for Pike County. “The dam appears very stable at this time,” Coghlan said. Mississippi officials stressed that reports Thursday that the waters had breached or overtopped the dam were incorrect. Opening the spillways will bring the water level back to normal but could cause flooding in a wide, sparsely populated stretch of Mississippi. Coghlan said residents had been warned and were planning on leaving for at least a night.
Those homes would also have been flooded in the event that the dam failed, he said. Once the water level drops back to normal, a process that could take days, crews will dig a trench out of the lake with the intention of causing a more serious drop in the water levels, Coghlan said. That will allow maintenance crews to go in and repair the dam, he said. Louisiana state officials estimated that between 40,000 and 60,000 homes would take on some water should the river flood. Many of those were outside the mandatory evacuation zone, which extended one mile on either side of the Tangipahoa River from Kentwood to Robert. It was unclear on Thursday exactly how many people lived in that area or how many were evacuated by the end of the day.
………………………………………
US Flooded: Video of Isaac aftermath, houses in water up to roofs
The area south of New Orleans has been plagued by flooding since Isaac sloshed ashore as a hurricane on Tuesday evening and pushed water over the 18-mile levee.
Aerial video footage shows dozens of homes surrounded by water up their rafters. The flood also unearthed caskets and uprooted trees at a local cemetery. The storm Isaac has been downgraded to a tropical depression, and the extent of the damage is becoming clearer. Crews set out in air boats in LaPlace and saw heavy mud and dirty water caking homes, street signs and trailers. They worked to save cows and other livestock from the debris. Evacuees from that town continue to be ferried by buses to various shelters. Many of them lost everything they owned except what they were able to carrying with them in the minutes before evacuating.
At least seven people are believed to have been killed after a landslide struck a gold-rush mountain community in the southern Philippines, the mayor of a nearby city said yesterday. Three days of heavy rains spawned the landslide on Thursday, which covered makeshift mining tunnels in a mountain area in Mindanao island, said Mati City Mayor Michelle Rabat. She said that a village chief in the isolated area told her by telephone that seven bodies had been recovered from the tunnels and the miners were digging to find more people believed buried. Other miners who descended from the mountains gave similar accounts, Rabat said. “Before the landslide, (a survivor) shouted to the people inside the tunnels to vacate the area. He saw three people running for their lives but it was too late. They were buried by the mudflow,” the mayor said. The gold-rich area has attracted thousands of small miners who tunnel into the side of the mountain despite the constant danger posed by landslides, quakes and collapsing tunnels, said Rabat. The area is so remote that it can only be reached through a lengthy motorcycle ride followed by an hour of hiking, making it difficult to determine the extent of the damage, she added. Military officials said soldiers had been dispatched to the affected area but they could not yet confirm any fatalities.
Ten people are dead and 14 others missing after a landslide hit a hydropower station in southwest China. Rescue work was under way at the site in Sichuan province’s Liangshan prefecture. Mud and stones began crashing down onto the station late Wednesday night and continued to fall into Thursday morning. The report did not say if anyone had survived the landslide and provincial officials could not immediately be reached for comment. Liangshan prefecture lies about 1,750 kilometers (1,100 miles) southwest of China’s capital Beijing.
The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant said Thursday that the amount of water injected into the crippled Nos. 1 to 3 reactors temporarily dropped below the level regarded as necessary to keep the fuel inside cool.
Tokyo Electric Power Co. said the drop in the volume of the water did not affect the temperature of the reactor pressure vessels, while adding that the company is investigating the cause of the incident.
The utility known as TEPCO noticed that the three reactors were not getting enough water injection at 3 p.m. Thursday. Workers took measures to increase the water volume and they confirmed at about 4:30 p.m. that it recovered to the necessary level.
At a gathering of politicians from prefectural and municipal governments in Japan, the veterinarian head of a non-profit organization called “Ecosystem Conservation Society of Japan” told the audience, quite off-handedly,
People in Fukushima, Tochigi, Saitama, Tokyo, Kanagawa where the radioactive plume went by, should not marry because the deformity rate of their offspring will skyrocket.
To the outraged delegation from Fukushima City, he says,
Tough. They misquoted me on purpose, I was just talking generalities.
Generalities. So these days in Japan, citing specific locales and predicting specific events like deformity of babies is talking generalities.
So far, only the delegation from Fukushima City is outraged. The reactions from the rest of Japan are two types:
Oh someone finally spoke the truth, and he is the head of some non-profit organization (that must mean his intentions are good), so we should take it seriously; or
Fukushima City Assemblymen including Mr. Kazuyoshi Sato held a press conference on August 29, and announced that they would demand the correction of the remark by Mr. Hobun Ikeya, head of a public interest incorporated foundation called “Ecosystem Conservation Society of Japan” during the lecture in July on the effect of the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant accident as “inappropriate and discriminatory, and cannot be tolerated”.
According to Assemblyman Sato and others, Mr. Ikeha said in the lecture, “You’d better not marry anyone from Fukushima”, and “Cancer rate may rise in Fukushima, and deformed babies may be born”.
According to the explanation by the Society and the recording that our reporter listened to, Mr. Ikeya also mentioned several prefectures in Kanto region that have had certain levels of radiation contamination because of the nuclear accident. He pointed out to the map of the region, and said, “People who live in the areas where the radioactive plume went by should avoid marrying at all costs.” He further said “If they marry and have children, the rate of deformity in babies will skyrocket.”
Mr. Ikeya responded to Asahi Shinbun and explained, “I wanted to emphasize the heightened risk of DNA damage and deformed babies due to radiation exposure. I discussed generalities, and had no intention of discrimination.”
The lecture was sponsored by the Ecosystem Conservation Society of Japan and held in Tokyo on July 9. Assemblypersons from municipalities throughout Japan participated, and four assemblymen including Mr. Sato from the Fukushima City Assembly participated.
Regarding the remarks that have been condemned as inappropriate by Mr. Hobun Ikeya (age 70) of the Ecosystem Conservation Society of Japan in a lecture in Tokyo, Mr. Ikeya released part of the transcript of the lecture to the press on August 29.
According to the transcript, he said, “It’s not just Fukushima, you know, people in Tochigi, Saitama, Tokyo, Kanagawa, people who were there should not marry at all costs”, and “If they get married and have children, the rate of deformity in babies will skyrocket.”
協会によると、録音を書き起こした内容で、県内の各報道機関に送った。
According to the Society, the document is a transcript from the recording, and it has been sent to news organizations in Fukushima Prefecture.
To Fukushima Minpo, Mr. Ikeya admitted that he had made these remarks, and argued, “I don’t think it’s discriminatory against people in Fukushima.” As to his insistence in the past that he hadn’t said anything like that, he answered, “I meant I hadn’t said anything discriminatory.”
Mr. Ikeya is a practicing veterinarian. The “Policy” lecture has been given once a year or so since 2003, and it was the 12th this year. 80 to 100 politicians from municipalities and citizens who aspire to become politicians participate. Last year’s lecture was canceled due to the March 11 disaster, and this year’s lecture was the first since the disaster.
Accusation that Mr. Ikeya is discriminating against Fukushima is not really true, as Mr. Ikeya is saying the same for four other prefectures in Kanto.
Well at least Mr. Ikeya is a veterinarian, remotely qualified (I suppose) to comment on something medical. The only (human) medical experts who expressed outrage are so-called “government experts” (including Professor Noboru Takamura of Nagasaki University and Fukushima Prefecture Radiation Health Risk Management Advisor who spoke soothing words to Iitate-mura villagers right after the accident, and Professor Masahiro Fukushi of Tokyo Metropolitan University who measured radiation levels in meals with faulty germanium semiconductor detector for NHK program), which is taken by many net citizens on Twitter to mean Mr. Ikeya must be telling the truth.
Never mind that Mr. Ikeya’s expertise is with sick animals.
The Japanese government and government institutions and its experts have only themselves to blame for the deep distrust of anything that has to do with the government for an off-hand remark by a veterinarian to be taken seriously as the truth.
Two men in Missouri who became severely ill after sustaining tick bites were found to be infected with a new type of virus, according to a study from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Both men were admitted to hospitals after experiencing high fevers, fatigue, diarrhea and loss of appetite. They were originally thought to be suffering from a bacterial infection, but doubts arose when they didn’t improve after being treated with antibiotics.
Further tests revealed their blood contained a new virus, which the researchers dubbed the Heartland virus. It belongs to a group called phleboviruses, which are carried by flies, mosquitoes or ticks, and can cause disease in humans.
(Reuters) – Some 10,000 people who stayed in tent cabins at Yosemite National Park this summer may be at risk for the deadly rodent-borne hantavirus, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday.
The CDC urged lab testing of patients who exhibit symptoms consistent with the lung disease, hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, after a stay at the California park between June and August and recommended that doctors notify state health departments when it is found.
Two men have died from hantavirus linked to the Yosemite outbreak and four others were sickened but survived, while the CDC said additional suspected cases were being investigated from “multiple health jurisdictions.”
Most of the victims were believed to have been infected while staying in one of 91 “Signature” tent-style cabins in Yosemite’s popular Curry Village camping area.
“An estimated 10,000 persons stayed in the ‘Signature Tent Cabins’ from June 10 through August 24, 2012,” the CDC said. “People who stayed in the tents between June 10 and August 24 may be at risk of developing HPS in the next six weeks.”
Yosemite officials earlier this week shut down all 91 of the insulated tent cabins after finding deer mice, which carry the disease and can burrow through holes the size of pencil erasers, nesting between the double walls.
Park authorities said on Friday that they had contacted approximately 3,000 parties of visitors who stayed in the tent cabins since mid-June, advising them to seek immediate medical attention if they have symptoms of hantavirus.
Nearly 4 million people visit Yosemite, one of the nation’s most popular national parks, each year, attracted to the its dramatic scenery and hiking trails. Roughly 70 percent of those visitors congregate in Yosemite Valley, where Curry Village is located.
YOSEMITE LOGS 1,500 CALLS
The virus starts out causing flu-like symptoms, including headache, fever, muscle ache, shortness of breath and cough, and can lead to severe breathing difficulties and death.
The incubation period for the virus is typically two to four weeks after exposure, the CDC said, with a range between a few days and six weeks. Just over a third of cases are fatal.
“Providers are reminded to consider the diagnosis of HPS in all persons presenting with clinically compatible illness and to ask about potential rodent exposure or if they had recently visited Yosemite National Park,” the CDC said.
Although there is no cure for hantavirus, which has never been known to be transmitted between humans, treatment after early detection through blood tests can save lives.
“Early medical attention and diagnosis of hantavirus are critical,” Yosemite superintendent Don Neubacher said in a statement. “We urge anyone who may have been exposed to the infection to see their doctor at the first sign of symptoms and to advise them of the potential of hantavirus.”
Yosemite spokeswoman Kari Cobb said rangers have answered some 1,500 phone calls from park visitors and others concerned about the disease. But she said the outbreak had not triggered a wave of cancellations
“Right now it’s normal numbers for Friday,” she said. “There have been cancellations, but it would be grossly overstated to say they’re cancelling en masse. There’s quite a bit of people out there still. It’s still summer and a holiday weekend. It’s still the summer crowds.”
A national park service officials has said that public health officials warned the park twice before about hantavirus after it struck visitors. But it was not until this week that the hiding place for the deer mice carrying the virus was found.
Hantavirus is carried in rodent feces, urine and saliva, which dries out and mixes with dust that can be inhaled by humans, especially in small, confined spaces with poor ventilation.
People can also be infected by eating contaminated food, touching contaminated surfaces or being bitten by infected rodents.
(Editing by Cynthia Johnston, Todd Eastham and Lisa Shumaker)
In the first confirmed case of bubonic plague in Colorado since 2006, an Archuleta County resident has tested positive for the disease. The last human case in Archuleta County, which borders on New Mexico, was in 1998. It is believed that the person contracted the plague during a family outing in the Cimarrona Campground northwest of Pagosa Springs, but the investigation is ongoing, according to a news release from the San Juan Basin Health Department. The gender and age of the victim were not released, the paper reported. In 2006, Colorado had four cases of plague, all in La Plata County, Joe Fowler, a disease-control nurse with the San Juan Basin Health Department said. Most human cases of plague tend to occur in rural areas in two regions — northern Arizona and New Mexico and southern Colorado or in California, southern Oregon and western Nevada. One human case has been reported in New Mexico so far this year – in a 78-year-old Torrance County man who contracted the disease in May, in what state health officials called the nation’s first human plague case of the yea
Biohazard name:
Plague
Biohazard level:
4/4 Hazardous
Biohazard desc.:
Viruses and bacteria that cause severe to fatal disease in humans, and for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, H5N1(bird flu), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus, hantaviruses, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and other hemorrhagic or unidentified diseases. When dealing with biological hazards at this level the use of a Hazmat suit and a self-contained oxygen supply is mandatory. The entrance and exit of a Level Four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, autonomous detection system, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a Biosafety Level 4 (P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.
A case of adult chicken pox has emerged at SF State. A school-wide email was sent out by Alastair K. Smith, MD to SF State students Aug. 31, saying that there is a student with a case of the chickenpox. Though the student infected does not live on campus, they were on campus August 27 and 29, visiting the Creative Arts building, Humanities building, Science building, Business building, Burk Hall and Bookstore during their infected stage. Varicella, commonly known as chickenpox, is a virus which symptoms include fever, tiredness, headaches and a rash that turns into itchy, fluid-filled blisters that scab after several days. Chickenpox is a condition that is spread by airborne particles, sweat and skin-to-skin contact. Scott Hongsweet, junior at SF State, had chickenpox when he was 4 years old, but is not concerned about the recent developments. “I’ve had chickenpox and it was like having bug bites all over your body,” said Hongsweet. “Though it was super itchy, I wouldn’t be weary of going to school if there was a person with chickenpox there, because the chances of me getting it are very slim.”The incubation period for chickenpox is 14 to 16 days and is infectious until five or six days after the onset of the rash, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Protection. Varicella carries the most complications for people over 15 years of age and under one year of age. Overall, it is estimated that adults account for 5 percent for reported cases of varicella but may carry the most risk, according to the CDC. SF State isn’t the only university in the bay area that has experienced a health scare among the student body. The University of California at Berkeley had a mumps scare during October where seven students were infected. Pregnant and immune-compromised people are at a high risk for infection, and persons who are not immune are suggested to get a dose of the varicella vaccine within three to five days of exposure. Smith addressed in the email to the school: “We are monitoring the situation carefully, and given that most persons have immunity through childhood exposure or vaccination, we do not expect a major outbreak on campus.” Beth Cross, junior at SF State, isn’t the least bit worried about chickenpox at her school. “I am not worried about the disease on campus…I am sure there are way worse diseases on campus,” said Cross.
Biohazard name:
Chickenpox
Biohazard level:
3/4 Hight
Biohazard desc.:
Bacteria and viruses that can cause severe to fatal disease in humans, but for which vaccines or other treatments exist, such as anthrax, West Nile virus, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, SARS virus, variola virus (smallpox), tuberculosis, typhus, Rift Valley fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, yellow fever, and malaria. Among parasites Plasmodium falciparum, which causes Malaria, and Trypanosoma cruzi, which causes trypanosomiasis, also come under this level.
ScienceDaily (Aug. 29, 2012) — A cost analysis of the technologies needed to transport materials into the stratosphere to reduce the amount of sunlight hitting Earth and therefore reduce the effects of global climate change has shown that they are both feasible and affordable.
Published August 31, 2012, in IOP Publishing’s journal Environmental Research Letters, the study has shown that the basic technology currently exists and could be assembled and implemented in a number of different forms for less than USD $5 billion a year.
Put into context, the cost of reducing carbon dioxide emissions is currently estimated to be between 0.2 and 2.5 per cent of GDP in the year 2030, which is equivalent to roughly USD $200 to $2000 billion.
Solar radiation management (SRM) looks to induce the effects similar to those observed after volcanic eruptions; however, the authors state that it is not a preferred strategy and that such a claim could only be made after the thorough investigation of the implications, risks and costs associated with these issues.
The authors caution that reducing incident sunlight does nothing at all to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, nor the resulting increase in the acid content of the oceans. They note that other research has shown that the effects of solar radiation management are not uniform, and would cause different temperature and precipitation changes in different countries.
Co-author of the study, Professor Jay Apt, said: “As economists are beginning to explore the role of several types of geoengineering, it is important that a cost analysis of SRM is carried out. The basic feasibility of SRM with current technology is still being disputed and some political scientists and policy makers are concerned about unilateral action.”
In the study, the researchers, from Aurora Flight Sciences, Harvard University and Carnegie Mellon University, performed an engineering cost analysis on six systems capable of delivering 1-5 million metric tonnes of material to altitudes of 18-30 km: existing aircraft, a new airplane designed to perform at altitudes up to 30 km, a new hybrid airship, rockets, guns and suspended pipes carrying gas or slurry to inject the particles into the atmosphere.
Based on existing research into solar radiation management, the researchers performed their cost analyses for systems that could deliver around one million tonnes of aerosols each year at an altitude between 18 and 25 km and between a latitude range of 30°N and 30°S.
The study concluded that using aircraft is easily within the current capabilities of aerospace engineering, manufacturing and operations. The development of new, specialized aircraft appeared to be the cheapest option, with costs of around $1 to $2 billion a year; existing aircraft would be more expensive as they are not optimized for high altitudes and would need considerable and expensive modifications to do so.
Guns and rockets appeared to be capable of delivering materials at high altitudes but the costs associated with these are much higher than those of airplanes and airships due to their lack of reusability.
Although completely theoretical at this point in time, a large gas pipe, rising to 20 km in the sky and suspended by helium-filled floating platforms, would offer the lowest recurring cost-per-kilogram of particles delivered but the costs of research into the materials required, the development of the pipe and the testing to ensure safety, would be high; the whole system carries a large uncertainty.
Professor Apt continued: “We hope our study will help other scientists looking at more novel methods for dispersing particles and help them to explore methods with increased efficiency and reduced environmental risk.”
The researchers make it clear that they have not sought to address the science of aerosols in the stratosphere, nor issues of risk, effectiveness or governance that will add to the costs of solar radiation management geoengineering.
Inspired by the nearly-full moon, space station astronauts used an 800 mm lens to study the craters and mare in this picture taken on Oct. 5, 2001.
CREDIT: NASA
The night skies this week have been very bright thanks to the moon, and they’ll get brighter still on Friday as a blue moon rises above the horizon.
The moon won’t literally be blue-colored, of course; the name refers to the second full moon to occur in a single month.
Blue moons happen because our calendar months don’t line up exactly with the moon’s orbit. It takes the moon 29.5 days to wax and wane from full to new to full again. With the exception of February, months are longer than that, meaning that every so often the timing works out so there are two full moons in one month.
The first full moon of August 2012 graced night skies on Aug. 1; for most of the world, the second just squeezes in at the end of the month, with the moon becoming full at exactly 9:58 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (6:58 a.m. Pacific Standard Time).
Though a blue moon looks the same as any other full moon, the moon can actually appear to be colored under particular atmospheric conditions: Forest fires and volcanic eruptions can pump smoke and ash into the atmosphere, which can make the moon appear a bluish hue to those standing on the Earth’s surface.
Two white dwarfs similar to those in the system SDSS J065133.338+284423.37 spiral together in this illustration from NASA. Credit: D. Berry/NASA GSFC
Locked in a spiraling orbital embrace, the super-dense remains of two dead stars are giving astronomers the evidence needed to confirm one of Einstein’s predictions about the Universe.
A binary system located about 3,000 light-years away, SDSS J065133.338+284423.37 (J0651 for short) contains two white dwarfs orbiting each other rapidly — once every 12.75 minutes. The system was discovered in April 2011, and since then astronomers have had their eyes — and four separate telescopes in locations around the world — on it to see if gravitational effects first predicted by Einstein could be seen.
According to Einstein, space-time is a structure in itself, in which all cosmic objects — planets, stars, galaxies — reside. Every object with mass puts a “dent” in this structure in all dimensions; the more massive an object, the “deeper” the dent. Light energy travels in a straight line, but when it encounters these dents it can dip in and veer off-course, an effect we see from Earth as gravitational lensing.
Einstein also predicted that exceptionally massive, rapidly rotating objects — such as a white dwarf binary pair — would create outwardly-expanding ripples in space-time that would ultimately “steal” kinetic energy from the objects themselves. These gravitational waves would be very subtle, yet in theory, observable.
What researchers led by a team at The University of Texas at Austin have found is optical evidence of gravitational waves slowing down the stars in J0651. Originally observed in 2011 eclipsing each other (as seen from Earth) once every six minutes, the stars now eclipse six seconds sooner. This equates to a predicted orbital period reduction of about 0.25 milliseconds each year.*
“These compact stars are orbiting each other so closely that we have been able to observe the usually negligible influence of gravitational waves using a relatively simple camera on a 75-year-old telescope in just 13 months,” said study lead author J.J. Hermes, a graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin.
Based on these measurements, by April 2013 the stars will be eclipsing each other 20 seconds sooner than first observed. Eventually they will merge together entirely.
Although this isn’t “direct” observation of gravitational waves, it is evidence inferred by their predicted effects… akin to watching a floating lantern in a dark pond at night moving up and down and deducing that there are waves present.
“It’s exciting to confirm predictions Einstein made nearly a century ago by watching two stars bobbing in the wake caused by their sheer mass,” said Hermes.
As of early last year NASA and ESA had a proposed mission called LISA (Laser Interferometer Space Antenna) that would have put a series of 3 detectors into space 5 million km apart, connected by lasers. This arrangement of precision-positioned spacecraft could have detected any passing gravitational waves in the local space-time neighborhood, making direct observation possible. Sadly this mission was canceled due to FY2012 budget cuts for NASA, but ESA is moving ahead with developments for its own gravitational wave mission, called eLISA/NGO — the first “pathfinder” portion of which is slated to launch in 2014.
The study was submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters on August 24. Read more on the McDonald Observatory news release here.
Inset image: simulation of binary black holes causing gravitational waves – C. Reisswig, L. Rezzolla (AEI); Scientific visualization – M. Koppitz (AEI & Zuse Institute Berlin)
*The difference in the eclipse time is noted as six seconds even though the orbital period decay of the two stars is only .25 milliseconds/year because of a pile-up effect of all the eclipses observed since April 2011. The measurements made by the research team takes into consideration the phase change in the J0651 system, which experiences a piling effect — similar to an out-of-sync watch — that increases relative to time^2 and is therefore a larger and easier number to detect and work with. Once that was measured, the actual orbital period decay could be figured out.
GREENCASTLE, Ind. (AP) — Residents of a central Indiana county have reported nearly 100 dead deer in what wildlife officials believe might be a disease outbreak.
An Indiana Department of Natural Resources biologist says most of those dead deer have been found in southern Putnam County.
Biologist Dean Zimmerman tells the Banner Graphic ( ) that 17 counties around the state have had suspected cases of epizootic hemorrhagic disease among deer, although Putnam County seems to have a large outbreak.
The illness is a viral disease transmitted by small flies that typically occurs during late summer and early fall. It doesn’t affect humans.
Zimmerman says the flies that carry the disease reproduce more successfully in dry weather and that it will take a killing frost to end the outbreak.
The Kyrgyz Health Ministry said Friday five people had tested positive for anthrax. The five were among nine people who had been hospitalized in the central Asian country for anthrax-like symptoms in the past month, a health ministry spokesman said. Quarantine authorities had adopted counter-epidemic measures in the infectious disease-hit areas, where people as well as livestock had been given a vaccination against the bacteria, the spokesman said.
Biohazard name:
Anthrax
Biohazard level:
4/4 Hazardous
Biohazard desc.:
Viruses and bacteria that cause severe to fatal disease in humans, and for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, H5N1(bird flu), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus, hantaviruses, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and other hemorrhagic or unidentified diseases. When dealing with biological hazards at this level the use of a Hazmat suit and a self-contained oxygen supply is mandatory. The entrance and exit of a Level Four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, autonomous detection system, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a Biosafety Level 4 (P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.
Symptoms:
Status:
confirmed
31.08.2012
Biological Hazard
Portugal
Municipality of Almada, [Costa da Caparica beaces]
Three beaches in Costa da Caparica just south of Lisbon were closed to bathers over the weekend due to an abundance of Portuguese Man-of-War jellyfish like looking creatures in the sea after a child was stung, the Maritime Police (MP) said. Red flags were raised to warn beach-goers not to enter the water and any people who do not obey the prohibition may be fined by the authorities. According to Wikipedia, despite its outward appearance the Man of War is not a jellyfish, but a siphonophore, which differs from jellyfish in that it is not actually a single creature, but a colonial organism made up of many minute individuals called zooids. Its long tentacles are poisonous enough nevertheless and well kept away from. This follows the release of a video on sites such as Youtube and Sapo showing a large shark off the coast near Lisbon. According to the Coast Guard, there is no reason to be alarmed, as it was just a Basking Shark that eats plankton and krill. Basking sharks, as their name suggests, like to bask in the sun on the surface of the water and are quite inoffensive to humans. Élio Vicente from Zoomarine in the Algarve said Basking Sharks and Whale Sharks are common round the coast of Portugal, but offer no risk to swimmers. “The hot weather heats the deep water creating more algae drawing in more ‘vegetarian sharks’” he said. These creatures have been here for thousands of years without harming anyone, he added, they just get a bad reputation from the term ‘shark’.
Biohazard name:
Portuguese Man-of-War jellyfish invasion
Biohazard level:
0/4 —
Biohazard desc.:
This does not included biological hazard category.
Out of the 36 patients, who underwent prophylactic treatment after identification of the anthrax hot bed in Zaporizhia region, currently two of them are remaining under supervision of physicians. “Today we can say that everything is fine with the people: out of 36 people, who received preventive treatment, only two are under the supervision of doctors now. They are a man and a woman from Voznesenka village, who had contacted the infected animal and were hospitalized immediately after the accident. Currently, they have no manifestations of disease, but to make sure that the health condition of these people is good, we should get the results of laboratory tests and withstand a certain period,” chief medical officer of Zaporizhia region Anatoly Sevalnev said. According to the deputy head of the Main Department for Veterinary Medicine in Zaporizhia region Serhit Dehtiarenko, the quarantine measures will continue until September 5.
Biohazard name:
Anthrax
Biohazard level:
4/4 Hazardous
Biohazard desc.:
Viruses and bacteria that cause severe to fatal disease in humans, and for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, H5N1(bird flu), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus, hantaviruses, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and other hemorrhagic or unidentified diseases. When dealing with biological hazards at this level the use of a Hazmat suit and a self-contained oxygen supply is mandatory. The entrance and exit of a Level Four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, autonomous detection system, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a Biosafety Level 4 (P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.
Streaks of red tide – a toxic algal bloom that threatens both marine life – were clearly visible in Noyac Bay during a flyover on Thursday. Aerial photographer Jeff Cully captured images of red tide lining the shore at Long Beach. Red tide has appeared in Long Island waters every summer since 2004, Chris Gobler, Ph.D., told Patch earlier this month, when the algal bloom made its first showing of the year. Gobler, a Stony Brook Southampton School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences professor, said red tide typically appears in late August, but this summer it was detected in late July. The early arrival could be attributed to high temperatures this summer, he said. “This red tide is caused by the dinoflagellate, cochlodinium,” Gobler explained. “Cochlodinium is not a human health threat but is highly toxic to marine life. Fish exposed to dense cochlodinium blooms cannot survive more than one to six hours, depending on their size. We have had fish die at the Southampton marine lab when our intake system brought in red tide water.” After patches of red tide have passed through, pound net fisherman have found that catches have died off, he added. The School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, thanks to $3 million in grants, announced Monday a plan to restore the health of another local bay, Shinnecock, by seeding eelgrass and shellfish beds in strategic areas where they are most likely to thrive. Shellfish filter algae from water, but their populations in Long Island waters have declined in recent decades, a trend marine sciences hope to turn around. If the effort proves successful, it could be implemented in other distressed bodies of water, both locally and around the world. Research demonstrates that algal blooms are made worse by an increased flow of nitrogen into the bays, from sources such as cesspools and fertilizers, Gobler said.
Biohazard name:
Red Tide
Biohazard level:
0/4 —
Biohazard desc.:
This does not included biological hazard category.
[In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes 'FAIR USE' of any such copyrighted material.]
The southern California town of Brawley has taken the unusual step of declaring a state of emergency after a swarm of earthquakes rattled nearly 20 mobile homes off their blocks and forced a slaughterhouse to close, the mayor said on Wednesday. It is uncommon for quake-hardy California cities to declare emergencies due to tremors, but Brawley mayor George Nava said the earthquake swarm is a unique case because it has lasted for days and caused millions of dollars in damage. The cluster of relatively small quakes, which are caused by water and other fluids moving around in the Earth’s crust, began on Saturday evening and climaxed the next day with a 5.5 temblor, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The tremors were continuing on Wednesday and geologists say there have been hundreds in total.Nava said leaders in Brawley, a city of 25,000 residents south of the state’s inland Salton Sea and 170 miles (275 km) southeast of Los Angeles, declared a local emergency late on Tuesday. Officials with surrounding Imperial County made a similar declaration on Wednesday. Nineteen mobile homes were knocked off their blocks and their residents forced out, Nava said. The auditorium at Brawley Union High School has been damaged and closed off, and the National Beef slaughter plant in Brawley has been temporarily shut down due to damage, he said. Local businesses have suffered millions of dollars in losses from closures and from customers staying away, Nava said. But he could not give an exact account of quake-related losses. The Red Cross and local government agencies will offer services to residents on Friday and Saturday at a local center. The emergency declaration allows Brawley to receive more assistance from Imperial County, Nava said. At one point, about 10,000 residents in the city were without power, and the quakes have also caused water line disruptions, Nava said. “When you don’t have an AC or running water, it’s just not a good thing in this weather,” he said. Jeanne Hardebeck, research seismologist for the U.S. Geological Survey, said earlier this week that the cluster of quakes is not a sign that a larger temblor is imminent.
A series of small earthquakes which began Wednesday night and continued into Thursday near a long-dormant volcanic peak in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands has prompted researchers to raise the alert level for the Little Sitkin volcano.
The nearly 4,000-foot-high Little Sitkin volcano is named for the island where it resides, located in the Rat Islands in the Aleutian chain. The volcano has shown little activity since scientists have started observing it, with only three questionable eruptive events at the volcano since that time. The most recent eruption may have come in 1900, according to the Alaska Volcano Observatory.
Still, the AVO page for Little Sitkin mentions there may have been a “cataclysmic eruption” on the island sometime after the last ice age, which ended more than 11,000 years ago.
Seismic equipment located near the volcano began detecting a “swarm of high-frequency earthquakes” at about 7:15 p.m. Wednesday, the AVO reports. The earthquakes continued through the night into Thursday, prompting the alert level at the volcano being raised. The alert level is currently at yellow, which means that the “volcano is exhibiting signs of elevated unrest above known background level.” Additionally, aircraft traveling in the area are advised to exercise caution.
The volcano is located in a remote part of the Aleutians, about 35 miles northwest of the World War II outpost of Amchitka and 200 miles west of Adak.
Little Sitkin joins two other Alaska volcanoes, Iliamna and Cleveland, currently sitting at elevated alert levels.
Photos: Alaska volcanoes
Apr 02, 2012
Pavlof volcano and eruption plume on evening of Aug. 30, 2007. View is to the south. Plume height approximately 17-18,000 ft.
Iliamna, 130 miles from Anchorage, Alaska’s largest city, was first elevated in March of this year following a continued increase in seismic activity.
“The current level of activity at Iliamna does not indicate an imminent or certain eruption,” a status update from the AVO said Thursday. “Seismic activity, along with gas emissions, appear to be declining gradually.”
Meanwhile, the oft-erupting Cleveland volcano which, like Sitkin, is located in the Aleutians, remains elevated as well. Cleveland has been upgraded a half-dozen times in since 2010 alone, and most recently erupted in June, when a pilot reported an ash cloud reaching up to 35,000 feet. Cleveland sits at a higher alert level than Iliamna or Little Sitkin, meaning the volcano still has a higher potential for eruption at any time.
Seismologists say a cluster of earthquakes has been detected at a remote volcano in Alaska’s western Aleutian Islands. The Alaska Volcano Observatory says the quakes began Wednesday evening at Little Sitkin Volcano and are continuing as of Thursday morning. No eruption has been detected. Scientist in charge John Power says there is no direct link to the swarm of earthquakes at Little Sitkin and a cluster of quakes that shook California’s Imperial County earlier this week. Powers says Little Sitkin is located on an uninhabited island and is far from any populated areas. He says the seismic activity is unusual for Little Sitkin, whose last eruption possibly in the early 1900s is questionable. Powers says the concern about an eruption would be the possible threat posed to aircraft.
South Korean rescuers Wednesday recovered two more bodies near two wrecked Chinese fishing boats, bringing the confirmed death toll from a powerful typhoon to 18.
Typhoon Bolaven — the strongest to hit the South for almost a decade — left a trail of death and damage in southwestern and south-central regions of the country.
It drove two Chinese fishing ships aground early Tuesday off the southern island of Jeju, sparking a dramatic rescue operation.
Coastguards wearing wetsuits struggled through high waves and pulled a total of 12 people to safety, and six swam ashore. Eight bodies had been recovered as of Wednesday and seven were still missing, the coastguard in Jeju said.
Dozens of divers are involved in the ongoing search. The coastguard said in a statement it would make “utmost efforts” to account for all the missing.
Most of the other deaths, confirmed by the public administration ministry, were caused by wind gusts that toppled walls or roofs or blew victims off their feet.
Typhoon alerts covering most of the country were lifted as ferries and flights returned to normal and schools reopened. But South Korea is now on watch for another typhoon, Tembin.
Bolaven moved on to North Korea, damaging crops and toppling some 3,700 roadside trees, the North’s official news agency said. Human casualties were not reported.
In North Hwanghae Province, the typhoon deactivated television relay facilities and destroyed or damaged some 20 houses and public buildings, the agency said, adding that “a lot of houses and roads” were submerged in other provinces.
Bolaven crossed the Yalu border river into China early Wednesday.
In South Korea, the typhoon was the strongest since 2003 in terms of wind speed. A maximum speed of 214 kilometres per hour (134 miles per hour) was recorded at Mount Mudeung in the southwestern city of Gwangju.
Power cuts of five minutes or longer hit nearly two million homes, a record in the country, the public administration ministry said.
The storm toppled nearly 8,000 trees and damaged 42 ships or boats and 35 houses. A total of 6,418 hectares (15,852 acres) of farmland was damaged.
Typhoon Tembin, located about 350 kilometres northeast of the Taiwanese capital Taipei early Wednesday, is approaching South Korea at a speed of 20 kilometres an hour.
The situation was bleak in some Eastbank Plaquemines Parish neighborhoods that were inundated by water as Hurricane Isaac pushed across the region.
Officials said an 18-mile stretch of levees was overtopped by water from the Mississippi River early Wednesday. The resulting flood brought as much as 10 feet of water to residential areas, early reports indicated.
The area includes a stretch from Braithwaite to White Ditch. Those communities were under a mandatory evacuation order because of safety concerns.
Plaquemines Parish President Billy Nungesser told WDSU that the problem was limited to overtopping, and not a breach. He described the situation as “serious.”
The National Weather Service noted: “This will result in significant deep flooding in this area.”
The levee is not part of the federal Corps of Engineers protection system.
WDSU reporter Travers Mackel said flood gates were closed to contain the water. He said there was concern that some people were trapped in dangerous conditions.
In nearby St. Bernard Parish, trees blocked roadways, making driving nearly impossible.
More than 400,000 Entergy customers on the south shore were without power.
WDSU reporter Gina Swanson said water was encroaching on an evacuation shelter in Raceland, in Lafourche Parish.
Jefferson Parish reported flooding in Lower Lafitte and water levels in the bayou that were up two feet from Tuesday.
The Harvey and Belle Chasse tunnels were closed — a move that followed the shut-down of the Lake Pontchartrain Causevay Tuesday evening.
Several fires, including major ones in Gretna and Arabi, were also reported.
(MOBILE, Ala.) – While Louisiana appears to be taking the heaviest blow from Hurricane Isaac, there’s no doubt the storm is impact our stretch of the Gulf.
One viewer send in video of waves churning in Mobile Bay ripping up a dock, and a man in Pensacola uploaded video of driving wind and rain from his pool.
Thousands have been without power in Mobile County but crews have been out trying to make those repairs today.
Lake Tangipahoa, a 450 to 500-acre lake at Percy Quinn State Park just north of the Mississippi state line, was swollen from Isaac’s rain, undermining a dam that, if it failed, would release the body of water into the Tangipahoa River that meanders down the parish’s length to Lake Pontchartrain. “That’s going to inundate an already flooded river,” said National Guard Col. Rodney Painting, the incoming commander of the Guard’s 225th Engineer Brigade who started his day helping oversee the evacuation of flooded areas in LaPlace and would end it in his native Tangipahoa helping oversee what appears to be the largest such effort in the state since Isaac made landfall Tuesday. Authorities in Mississippi tried to ease the pressure by releasing some of the water, an effort said to be working. Louisiana officials are taking no chances.State and parish officials called a mandatory evacuation for communities from Kentwood to Robert. If the dam breaks, the National Guard will go into the affected communities with high-water vehicles and small boats, “that we can get through the flooded woods or streets if we have to,” said Painter, who during the Isaac state of emergency has helped coordinate evacuation sites at Zephyr Field in Metairie and in Slidell before moving to Laplace and Amite. In the “controlled release” using spillways, the water from the lake flooded out into a sparsely inhabited area of Mississippi on Thursday afternoon, relieving pressure on a dam scoured by Hurricane Isaac that threatened to push water levels in the Tangipahoa River up to 17 feet in Louisiana. Officials believe the controlled release of waters through emergency spillways will allow the water level to stabilize and lessen pressure on the dam until crews can breach the edge of Tangipahoa Lake near McComb and drain another 8 feet of water.While the release is expected to protect communities on the north shore, officials in Mississippi said about 20 homes on their side of the state line will be flooded out and emergency crews conducted a door-to-door effort to warn residents to leave their homes. Meanwhile, a more massive effort was occurring miles downriver, as National Guard units and other state assets attempted to get 40,000 to 60,000 people out of their homes. Though the water level in the lake was dropping and Mississippi officials downplayed the seriousness of the dam’s condition, Gov. Bobby Jindal continued to urge residents to leave potential flood zones in Tangipahoa Parish Thursday night. “The worse thing that could happen is that people get a false sense of confidence and then if there be a breach overnight it would be a lot harder for people to evacuate,” Jindal said. From the Florida Parishes Arena, troops drove school buses to collection points, where they’re driving evacuees to evacuation shelters set up at schools. School buses have been brought in from as far as Avoylles Parish and Terrebonne Parish, each driven by soldiers. “I’ve already got buses on the road full of people,” said Lt. Col. Vincent Tallo.
About 200 coaches and school buses are being rushed to Tangipahoa, said First Sgt. Rufus Jones of 3rd Battalion, 156th Infantry Regiment, a Guard combat unit whose soldiers, all armed with M4 rifles, waited in the arena for missions that would likely would include security details. By Thursday night, Tallo said he expected 300 National Guard troops in the parish, assisting the evacuation. The National Guard received the mission at 10 a.m., Thursday, said Maj. Scott Slaven, who commands the 205th Engineer Battalion in Bogalusa. Troops and equipment are staged on both sides of the Tangipahoa River, Slaven said. At Pontchatoula High School, Darryl Holliday of Kajun Kettle Foods Inc., which has a state contract to feed evacuees, was told to brace for 2,000 people. At 6:30 p.m., none of the evacuees had reached the school on Louisiana 22. Holliday said he was told that 40 people were en route. Painter said the plan calls for keeping evacuees in Tangipahoa Parish. At the Florida Parishes Arena, employees of the state Department of Children and Family Services prepared to account for the evacuees with forms, in part designed to identify families.
The damage to dam prompted Parish President Gordon Burgess to order mandatory evacuations along the Tangipahoa River, which were carried out with the assistance of the state and National Guard units. The first reports of problems with the dam came into emergency operations officials at 8 a.m., when crews noticed two “sloughs” where dirt was sliding down the sides of the earthen structure, said Greg Flynn, spokesman for the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency. Those sloughs are the first sign of a problem with the integrity of a dam, Flynn said. The damage was caused by rain from Hurricane Isaac, which raised the water level of the recreational fishing lake by several feet, said Richard Coghlan, Emergency Coordinator for Pike County. “The dam appears very stable at this time,” Coghlan said. Mississippi officials stressed that reports Thursday that the waters had breached or overtopped the dam were incorrect. Opening the spillways will bring the water level back to normal but could cause flooding in a wide, sparsely populated stretch of Mississippi. Coghlan said residents had been warned and were planning on leaving for at least a night.
Those homes would also have been flooded in the event that the dam failed, he said. Once the water level drops back to normal, a process that could take days, crews will dig a trench out of the lake with the intention of causing a more serious drop in the water levels, Coghlan said. That will allow maintenance crews to go in and repair the dam, he said. Louisiana state officials estimated that between 40,000 and 60,000 homes would take on some water should the river flood. Many of those were outside the mandatory evacuation zone, which extended one mile on either side of the Tangipahoa River from Kentwood to Robert. It was unclear on Thursday exactly how many people lived in that area or how many were evacuated by the end of the day.
Officials rushed to evacuate more than 100 nursing home residents from Plaquemines Parish, an area with a reputation for weathering storms and perhaps the hardest hit by Isaac. In this hardscrabble, mostly rural parish, even the sick and elderly are hardened storm veterans. Other residents in the Riverbend Nursing and Rehabilitation Center were loaded into ambulances and taken to a nearby naval station. By midafternoon Wednesday, Isaac had been downgraded to a tropical storm. The Louisiana National Guard ceased rescue operations in Plaquemines Parish, saying it felt confident it had gotten everyone out. There were no serious injuries. National Guard spokesman Capt. Lance Cagnolatti said guardsmen would stay in the area over the coming days to help. By early Thursday, Isaac’s maximum sustained winds had decreased to 45 mph and the National Hurricane Center said it was expected to become a tropical depression by Thursday night, meaning its top sustained winds would drop below 39 mph. The storm’s center was on track to cross Arkansas on Friday and southern Missouri on Friday night, spreading rain as it goes.
Torrential rain left motorists battling flooded roads and residents using sandbags to stem the flow of flash floods. And yesterday’s downpour means the county is on track to record one of the wettest Augusts in recent years as families rue the summer that never was. The rain – which hit Staffordshire during yesterday morning and afternoon – forced local authorities and members of the emergency services to attempt to combat a number of deep floods. Weather experts said yesterday’s adverse conditions mean the region is on course to have endured a worse summer than the previous year. Figures from the Met Office have revealed the first two weeks of August saw 36mm of rain fall in the county. In July the region was hit with 139mm. Yesterday’s downpour caused problems across the city, along with Newcastle and the Staffordshire Moorlands. Staff from Staffordshire Moorlands District Council’s street cleaning team handed out sandbags to residents in Endon, Blythe Bridge, Stockton Brook and Brown Edge in a bid to tackle flooding. Firefighters were sent out to close off Endon’s Brook Lane after a flooded ford resulted in the area being deluged in 3ft high water. Crews from Leek and Endon also helped residents safely turn off their electricity and gas as water swept through the area. Last night motorists were being advised to avoid Brown Edge’s Breach Lane. A spokesman for Staffordshire Fire and Rescue said: “We’d urge people to monitor warnings given by the Environment Agency and to avoid driving in areas where there is localised flooding.”
Aug. 30 (Bloomberg) — Almost half of tuberculosis patients who received prior treatment were resistant to a second-line drug, suggesting the deadly disease may become “virtually untreatable,” according to a new study.
Among 1,278 patients who were resistant to two or more first-line tuberculosis drugs in Estonia, Latvia, Peru, Philippines, Russia, South Africa, South Korea and Thailand, 43.7 percent showed resistance to at least one second-line drug, according to a study led by Tracy Dalton at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The findings were published in the Lancet medical journal today.
About 1.4 million people died from TB, the second-deadliest infectious disease globally after AIDS, and 650,000 cases were multi-drug resistant in 2010, according to the World Health Organization. Rising infection rates prompted the U.K. to announce in May it will require pre-entry tuberculosis screening for migrants from 67 countries seeking to enter the country for more than 6 months.
“The global emergence of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis heralds the advent of widespread, virtually untreatable tuberculosis,” the study authors said in the published paper.
Previous treatment with second-line drugs was the strongest risk factor for resistance to these drugs, the authors said.
Alcohol Abuse
The prevalence of drug resistance, which ranged from 33 percent in Thailand to 62 percent in Latvia, also correlates with how long second-line drugs have been available in each country.
South Korea and Russia had the longest histories of availability — more than 20 years — and the highest rates of resistance. In contrast, Thailand, Philippines and Peru, where second-line drugs were introduced 10 years ago or less, had the lowest resistance rates.
Unemployment, alcohol abuse and smoking were also associated with resistance to second-line injectable treatment across countries.
This is one of the few studies that have followed patients with the multi-drug-resistant form of TB for several years, Justin Denholm, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, said in a phone interview.
Patients not taking their medicines properly is a major driver for resistance, said Denholm, who is studying TB transmission patterns in Australia’s Victoria state.
Individualized Treatment
The WHO’s current strategy for tackling TB is called Dots, short for “directly observed treatment, short course.” Under Dots, patients are required to show up at a clinic three times a week to be supervised when taking their medicine to be sure they complete the treatment.
“The reality is that this one-size-fits-all approach is a major part of what’s led to this drug resistance issue,” Denholm said. “I think individualized treatment is what we should be aiming for.”
Scientists are also researching new treatments. In a study published last month in the Lancet, researchers from Stellenbosch University in Cape Town said an experimental three- drug combination killed 99 percent of the bacteria within two weeks. As the combination doesn’t contain isoniazid or rifampicin, the two main medicines used against TB, it may also provide a much-needed weapon against drug-resistant strains, the researchers wrote.
China Survey
India and China, which have the world’s highest numbers of tuberculosis cases, weren’t included in Dalton’s study as they hadn’t begun pilot programs for increasing access to second-line drugs until after the study began.
In a 2007 national survey in China, 27 percent of multi- drug-resistant tuberculosis cases showed resistance to the antibiotic fluoroquinolone, according to the Lancet report. In India, a 2006 population-based survey in the western state of Gujarat reported fluoroquinolone resistance in 24 percent of cases.
The U.K. Border Agency this month began requiring TB screening for Indians applying for a settlement visa and will extend the rule to those obtaining a work visa from Sept. 10. The new requirement replaces screening at airports.
TB is at the highest level in 30 years in the U.K. In London, 84 percent of the 3,302 people infected in 2010 were foreign-born, according to the Health Protection Agency.
30.08.2012
Epidemic Hazard
USA
State of Colorado, [Cimarrona Campground, Archuleta County]
A camper near Pagosa Springs has contracted bubonic plague. The Durango Herald reports that the person contracted the plague during a family outing in the Cimarrona Campground. The San Juan Basin Health Department did not give the victim’s age or gender. Warning signs are being posted in the campground, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports an average of seven cases of plague each year across the country. Most human cases tend to occur in rural areas in the Southwest. Symptoms of plague begin two to six days after a person is bitten by an infected flea, rodent or cat. The plague can be successfully treated if diagnosed promptly.
A vast outcrop of the Arctic Siberian coast that had been frozen for tens of thousands of years is releasing huge carbon deposits as rising temperatures thaw parts of its coastline, a study warned Wednesday.
The carbon, a potential source of Earth-warming CO2, has lain frozen along the 7,000-kilometre (4,400-mile) northeast Siberian coastline since the last Ice Age.
But atmospheric warming and coastal erosion are gnawing at the icy seal, releasing about 40 million tonnes of carbon a year — 10 times more than previously thought, said a study in the journal Nature.
About two-thirds of the carbon escapes into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (CO2) and the rest becomes trapped in higher layers of ocean sediment.
About half the carbon pool in soil globally is held in permafrost in the Arctic, a region that is experiencing twice the global average of climate warming, said the study led by researchers at Stockholm University.
Earlier this week, US scientists said the sea ice in the Arctic Ocean had melted to its smallest point ever.
The region covered by the Nature study, called Yedoma, is twice the size of Sweden but has been poorly researched because it is so remote.
The finding touches on a vicious circle, or positive feedback in climate parlance.
Under this, man-made warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels releases naturally-occurring stocks of CO2 that have been stored in permafrost since the last Ice Age, called the Pleistocene.
The released gases in turn add to global warming, which frees even more locked-up carbon, and so on.
“Thermal collapse and erosion of these carbon-rich Pleistocene coastline and seafloor deposits may accelerate the Arctic amplification of climate warming,” the paper warned.
The atmospheric leakage from Yedoma is equivalent to the annual emissions of around five million passenger cars, on the basis of average carbon output (five tonnes per year) of vehicles in the United States.
In a separate study also in Nature, researchers in Britain, the Netherlands and the United States used computer models to estimate there could be as much as four billion tonnes of methane under Antarctica’s icesheet.
Methane is 25 times more efficient at trapping solar heat than carbon dioxide.
Before it froze over, the region teemed with life whose organic remains became trapped in sediment later covered by ice sheets.
“Our modelling shows that over millions of years, microbes may have turned this old organic carbon into methane,” which could boost climate warming if released by icesheet collapse, the researchers said in a statement.
The collapse of the Antarctic icesheet is considered an extremely remote scenario by most climatologists, and some studies have suggested that parts of it could be thickening, due to localised increases in snowfall.
Out of the 36 patients, who underwent prophylactic treatment after identification of the anthrax hot bed in Zaporizhia region, currently two of them are remaining under supervision of physicians. “Today we can say that everything is fine with the people: out of 36 people, who received preventive treatment, only two are under the supervision of doctors now. They are a man and a woman from Voznesenka village, who had contacted the infected animal and were hospitalized immediately after the accident. Currently, they have no manifestations of disease, but to make sure that the health condition of these people is good, we should get the results of laboratory tests and withstand a certain period,” chief medical officer of Zaporizhia region Anatoly Sevalnev said. According to the deputy head of the Main Department for Veterinary Medicine in Zaporizhia region Serhit Dehtiarenko, the quarantine measures will continue until September 5.
Biohazard name:
Anthrax
Biohazard level:
4/4 Hazardous
Biohazard desc.:
Viruses and bacteria that cause severe to fatal disease in humans, and for which vaccines or other treatments are not available, such as Bolivian and Argentine hemorrhagic fevers, H5N1(bird flu), Dengue hemorrhagic fever, Marburg virus, Ebola virus, hantaviruses, Lassa fever, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and other hemorrhagic or unidentified diseases. When dealing with biological hazards at this level the use of a Hazmat suit and a self-contained oxygen supply is mandatory. The entrance and exit of a Level Four biolab will contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, autonomous detection system, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard. Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors opening at the same time. All air and water service going to and coming from a Biosafety Level 4 (P4) lab will undergo similar decontamination procedures to eliminate the possibility of an accidental release.
Streaks of red tide – a toxic algal bloom that threatens both marine life – were clearly visible in Noyac Bay during a flyover on Thursday. Aerial photographer Jeff Cully captured images of red tide lining the shore at Long Beach. Red tide has appeared in Long Island waters every summer since 2004, Chris Gobler, Ph.D., told Patch earlier this month, when the algal bloom made its first showing of the year. Gobler, a Stony Brook Southampton School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences professor, said red tide typically appears in late August, but this summer it was detected in late July. The early arrival could be attributed to high temperatures this summer, he said. “This red tide is caused by the dinoflagellate, cochlodinium,” Gobler explained. “Cochlodinium is not a human health threat but is highly toxic to marine life. Fish exposed to dense cochlodinium blooms cannot survive more than one to six hours, depending on their size. We have had fish die at the Southampton marine lab when our intake system brought in red tide water.” After patches of red tide have passed through, pound net fisherman have found that catches have died off, he added. The School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, thanks to $3 million in grants, announced Monday a plan to restore the health of another local bay, Shinnecock, by seeding eelgrass and shellfish beds in strategic areas where they are most likely to thrive. Shellfish filter algae from water, but their populations in Long Island waters have declined in recent decades, a trend marine sciences hope to turn around. If the effort proves successful, it could be implemented in other distressed bodies of water, both locally and around the world. Research demonstrates that algal blooms are made worse by an increased flow of nitrogen into the bays, from sources such as cesspools and fertilizers, Gobler said.
Biohazard name:
Red Tide
Biohazard level:
0/4 —
Biohazard desc.:
This does not included biological hazard category.
Symptoms:
Status:
Today
Biological Hazard
Ireland
Multiple areas, [Beaches in Waterford and Cork, and Kerry]
Portuguese men-of-war, which look like jellyfish and whose sting can cause severe pain and, in rare cases, death in humans, has been seen on beaches in Waterford and Cork, and may yet reach Kerry coasts. The Irish Water Safety organisation yesterday warned swimmers, surfers and other beach users that Portuguese men-of- war have been seen in Tramore, Ardmore, Inchydoney and Schull, and that there is a risk they may drift farther north. The invertebrate and carnivore creature is a siphonophore, which means it is made up of a colony of organisms working together. Its float is about 30cm long and 13cm wide and it has tentacles that can reach 50m in length. The stinging venom-filled nematocysts in the tentacles cause severe pain to humans, leaving whip-like red welts on the skin. A sting may lead to an allergic reaction. There can also be serious effects, including fever, shock, and interference with heart and lung function. Stings may also cause death, although this is extremely rare.
Biohazard name:
Portuguese man O War Jellyfish invasion
Biohazard level:
0/4 —
Biohazard desc.:
This does not included biological hazard category.
Once a resident of rivers throughout Japan, the Japanese river otter hasn’t been seen for more than 30 years. Today, the otter was officially deemed extinct by Japan’s Ministry of the Environment. The unique species of otter was designated as natural monument in Japan as the first Japanese mammal to have survived into the Showa Era (1926-1989) before succumbing to extinction. Two species of Japanese bat and two species of wolves became extinct in the Meija Era (1868-1912).
Over-hunting for its fur combined with habitat destruction from human development drove the river otter to near extinction by the 1930s. By the late ’70s the river otter was added to the “Red List of Threatened Mammals of Japan” as critically endangered. The last official sighting of a Japanese river otter was in 1979 along the banks of the Shinjo River in Susaki, Kochi Prefecture.
An adult river otter grew to about 110 centimeters (43 inches) in length, including a tail of up to 50 centimeters (20 inches), sporting a thick, lush coat of fur and short webbed feet. The typical diet for a Japanese river otter consisted mainly of fish, crab and shrimp, but they also dined on eels, sweet potatoes, watermelons and beetles.
Hope after extinction?
Official survey records from the Ministry of the Environment indicate the river otter disappeared from the northern island of Hokkaido in the 1950s and on the main island of Honshu in the 1960s. In the early 1990s research teams assembled in Kochi Prefecture, located in the southwestern part of the island of Shikoku, to see if they could find evidence of surviving otters. In March 1992 the researchers found hair and excrement that was determined to have come from an otter — perhaps the last official evidence of a surviving Japanese river otter.
But Yoshihiko Machida, professor emeritus at Kochi University, isn’t quite ready to sound the death knell for the Japanese river otter, citing reports of confirmed otter droppings found as late as 1999:
“I think it is possible that they still exist, and I want to continue my investigations,” he said in response to the declaration of the otter’s extinction.
Hope springs eternal.
30.08.2012
Environment Pollution
United Kingdom
Scotland, North Sea, [Between Tartan Alpha platform and Galley field]
An oil spill response spill vessel has been deployed to a North Sea field after oil started leaking from crack in a subsea pipeline. An estimated 13 barrels of oil have leaked from the pipeline which connects the Galley field to Talisman’s Tartan Alpha platform, 117 miles north-east of Aberdeen. The leak was first spotted last Friday. A spokesman for Talisman Energy said: “Talisman Energy (UK) Limited can confirm that following the identification of a crack in the production pipeline which connects the Galley field to the Tartan Alpha platform, flushing operations are being carried out using seawater to remove the production fluids from the pipeline. “This is being carried out in accordance with a plan developed by a specialist team and agreed with the Department of Energy and Climate Change, bringing the situation to a safe and timely resolution. All relevant authorities have been informed and are being kept updated.” He added: “Based on the investigatory and monitoring activity undertaken since we identified the issue on 24 August, we estimate the maximum total release to date is 88 barrels of fluids, of which approximately 13 would be oil and the rest water. “We take our responsibility to safeguard the environment very seriously and, as a precaution we deployed a spill recovery and containment vessel with oil spill response equipment on board, while monitoring the leak area by ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) on a round-the-clock basis. The oil spill response vessel will remain on station during subsequent remedial works. “In addition, we have established a regular programme of spotter plane flights to monitor the sea surface and placed a trained wildlife observer on a vessel at the site to monitor seabirds and marine life.”
[In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit, for research and/or educational purposes. This constitutes 'FAIR USE' of any such copyrighted material.]
National Earthquake Information Center
U.S. Geological Survey http://neic.usgs.gov/
California earthquake swarm felt in Arizona, Mexico, USGS says
The series of moderate earthquakes — including several magnitude 5.0 and above — were felt as far north as Orange County, east into Arizona and south into Mexico, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
The USGS recorded more than two dozen earthquakes in Imperial County, many of them near Brawley. Officials said people reported feeling the quake in Yuma, Ariz., Lake Havasu as well as in Baja California.
The USGS’s “Do You Feel It” system shows the quakes were felt as far away as San Diego, Temecula and San Clemente. The 5.4 quake was also felt in Moreno Valley, Indio, National City and Palm Desert.
The quakes could be felt in the press box at the Del Mar Race Track in neighboring San Diego County, where the $1-million Pacific Classic is scheduled later Sunday.
Between 10 a.m. and 12:50 p.m., the same area was shaken by quakes ranging in magnitude from 2.0 to 5.4, the USGS reported.
The burst of quakes took place roughly 16 miles from El Centro and 92 miles from Tijuana. In the last 10 days, there have been six earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or greater centered nearby.
There were no immediate reports of serious damage or injuries from the temblor, though reports were still coming in.
The border region is known for frequent seismic activity, though the size of these quakes is larger than typically seen.
Here is a preliminary magnitude count of some of the quakes Sunday:
— 5.3 magnitude at 12:32:59
— 5.4 magnitude at 12:31:23
— 5.3 magnitude at 12:30:54
— 3.7 magnitude at 12:30:27
— 4.7 magnitude at 12:21:04
— 4.6 magnitude at 12:20:04
The size of the quakes are subject to change as the USGS refines its data.
Map provided by the U.S. Geologic Survey shows the earthquake swarm. The most recent quakes are in red.
SAN DIEGO (AP) – Dozens of small to moderate earthquakes struck the southeastern corner of California on Sunday, causing minor damages to structures and rattling nerves in a small farming town east of San Diego.
The largest quake registered at a magnitude 5.5 and was centered about three miles northwest of the town of Brawley, said Robert Graves, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey. Another quake Sunday registered at magnitude 5.3.
More than 30 additional earthquakes with magnitudes of at least 3.5 jiggled the same area near the southern end of the Salton Sea, Graves said.
“The type of activity that we’re seeing could possibly continue for several hours or even days,” Graves said.
At the El Sol Market in Brawley, food packages fell from the shelves, littering aisle ways.
Several glasses and a bottle of wine crashed to the floor and shattered at Assaggio, an Italian restaurant in Brawley, said owner Jerry Ma. The shaking was short-lived but intense, he said.
“It felt like there was quake every 15 minutes. One after another. My kids are small and they’re scared and don’t want to come back inside,” said Mike Patel, who manages Townhouse Inn & Suites in Brawley.
A TV came crashing down and a few light fixtures broke inside the motel, Patel said.
A Brawley Police Department dispatcher said several downtown buildings sustained minor damage. No injuries were reported.
The first quake, with a magnitude of 3.9, occurred at 10:02 a.m. The USGS said more than 100 aftershocks struck the same approximate epicenter, about 16 miles north of El Centro.
Some shaking was felt along the San Diego County coast in Del Mar, some 120 miles from the epicenter, as well as in the Coachella Valley, southern Orange County and parts of northern Mexico.
USGS seismologist Lucy Jones said earthquake swarms are characteristic of the region, known as the Brawley Seismic Zone.
“The area sees lots of events at once, with many close to the largest magnitude, rather than one main shock with several much smaller aftershocks,” Jones said.
The last major swarm was in 2005, following a magnitude-5.1 quake, she said.
Sunday’s quake cluster occurred in what scientists call a transition zone between the Imperial and San Andreas faults, so they weren’t assigning the earthquakes to either fault, Graves said.
The series of moderate earthquakes — including several magnitude 5.0 and above — were felt as far north as Orange County, east into Arizona and south into Mexico, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The USGS recorded more than two dozen earthquakes in Imperial County, many of them near Brawley. Officials said people reported feeling the quake in Yuma, Ariz., Lake Havasu as well as in Baja California. The USGS’s “Do You Feel It” system shows the quakes were felt as far away as San Diego, Temecula and San Clemente. The 5.4 quake was also felt in Moreno Valley, Indio, National City and Palm Desert. The quakes could be felt in the press box at the Del Mar Race Track in neighboring San Diego County, where the $1-million Pacific Classic is scheduled later Sunday. Between 10 a.m. and 12:50 p.m., the same area was shaken by quakes ranging in magnitude from 2.0 to 5.4, the USGS reported. The burst of quakes took place roughly 16 miles from El Centro and 92 miles from Tijuana. In the last 10 days, there have been six earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or greater centered nearby. There were no immediate reports of serious damage or injuries from the temblor, though reports were still coming in. The border region is known for frequent seismic activity, though the size of these quakes is larger than typically seen.
Home video captured the aftermath of one of two moderate earthquakes that struck Imperial County on Sunday, part of a swarm of more than 70 that hit the region. The video shows books and DVDs toppled from shelves and some belongings fallen to the floor. The video was posted on YouTube on Sunday afternoon. But damage appear to be minor. Imperial County officials said no injuries have been reported. A handful of buildings in downtown Brawley had minor damage after an earthquake swarm rattled the area Sunday, officials said. Most of the quakes occurred in and around that California town. Capt. Jesse Zendejas of the Brawley Fire Department described the damage as “cosmetic” and said it occurred in at least three buildings dating to the 1930s. Crews were still assessing other areas of the city, but no injuries had been reported, he said. Imperial County firefighters were also assisting in the survey. The first quake – a magnitude 3.8 temblor, which was downgraded from 3.9 – occurred at 10:02 a.m. about three miles northwest of Brawley and was followed by a series of other quakes in the same general area, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, which may continue to revise the numbers. Thomas Jordan, director of the USC-based Southern California Earthquake Center, called the activity a “very active swarm” – something not unusual for the southern edge of the San Andreas Fault, which has seen similar occurrences in recent years. This swarm could continue to rumble the region for a few days, Jordan added. “It’s been pretty productive so far,” he said. “It’s a vigorous one. We got some pretty good-sized events.” As data continued to roll in, Jordan said, scientists would study the swarm to learn how the sequence developed and what effect it could have on the fault. “We’re always concerned where there is significant seismic activity because that means there is a higher probability of having more seismic activity,” he said.
Anak Krakatau in the Sunda Strait, 130 kilometers west of Jakarta, was created by the same tectonic forces that led to the 1883 Krakatoa eruption that killed tens of thousands of people. (Reuters Photo)
The 
