The BBC’s Rajesh Mirchandani says people have been enduring triple-digit temperatures

Four water companies in Britain which imposed hosepipe bans earlier this year have lifted the restrictions after months of unseasonable heavy rain.

The move comes after a week of torrential downpours triggered floods across large swathes of the country in the wettest June on record in Britain.

In a joint statement, water suppliers said “abnormally heavy rainfall” meant groundwater supplies had recovered sufficiently to allow them to lift the ban.

South East Water, Sutton and East Surrey Water, Veolia Water Central and Veolia Water Southeast imposed restrictions in early April after two unusually dry winters led to a drought in parts of Britain.

Three other companies which also had bans in place lifted them last month.

Mike Hegarty, operations director for Sutton and East Surrey Water, said the recovery of underground water sources at this time of year was unexpected but “most welcome”.

“The recharge (of aquifers) is unprecedented and is the highest increase in water levels ever recorded in our area at this time of year,” he said.

Figures from Britain’s Met Office national weather service show that double the average rain fell in June — the wettest since records began in 1910 — while April was also the wettest on record.

Forecasters have warned that the wet weather could continue further into the British summer, and warned that sunny weather in London is “very unlikely” during the London Olympics.

Forecasters said below average sunshine and temperatures were expected during the Games which run from July 27 to August 12, with very wet conditions more probable than dry ones.

Last month heavy rains drenched revellers celebrating Queen Elizabeth II’s diamond jubilee, while on Saturday spectators were turned away from the British Grand Prix at Silverstone due to flooded car parks.

The Environment Agency has 14 flood warnings, meaning flooding is expected, and 84 flood alerts signalling possible flooding, in place across the country.

Postal worker at the mail sorting machines at the Brentwood postal facility. He is wearing a face mask and gloves as a precaution against anthrax exposure.

Devastating floods in northeast India have killed around 600 animals in the region’s largest wildlife park, including more than a dozen threatened one-horned rhinos, officials said Monday.

“Most of the animals either drowned or were mown down by speeding vehicles when they tried to flee the heavy flooding,” said S.K. Bora, director of 430-square-kilometre (165-square-mile) Kaziranga National Park in Assam state.

“The water level is now receding, but the vast majority of animals that fled the park are yet to return,” he told AFP by telephone.

According to Bora, various species of deer accounted for more than 500 of the animal victims, which also included 14 rhinos and two elephant calves.

Assam has been the focus of severe regional flooding in recent weeks, triggered by heavy monsoon rains that caused the Brahmaputra river to burst its banks, inundating large areas of the state.

Nearly 130 people have been killed and six million displaced by the floodwaters, according to official figures.

Kaziranga is home to the world’s single largest population of one-horned rhinos. A 2012 census in the park counted 2,290 of the rhinos, out of a global population of 3,300.

The species declined to near extinction in the early 1900s, and is currently listed as “vulnerable” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Kaziranga has fought a sustained battle against rhino poachers, who kill the animals for their horns, which fetch huge prices in some Asian countries where they are deemed to have aphrodisiac qualities.

Assam Forests Minister Rockybul Hussain voiced concerns that poachers would prey on those rhinos that had been forced out of the protective ring of the park by the flooding.

Twelve factories in eastern China were closed down after children living nearby were found to have high levels of lead in their blood, state press reported Monday.

While local authorities sought to downplay the significance of the shutdown, it is the latest in a string of incidents to highlight the increasing environmental and health costs of rampant economic development across China.

“All 12 factories, related to metals, chemicals and recycled paper, have been halted for investigation,” the government of Jian city said in a statement carried in the state-run press on Monday.

The controversy surfaced when a boy living near the industrial park containing the factories was found last month to have higher-than-normal levels of lead in his blood, the China Youth Daily reported.

After a further 15 children were discovered to have excess lead levels, worried parents lobbied local authorities to close the factories, according to the report.

Prolonged exposure to lead can cause nausea and pain within the body, and may damage the heart and kidneys and harm fertility, according to the US Center for Disease Control.

While the government bowed to community pressure in closing the factories, the Jian city government said there was no evidence to show lead had leached out of the industrial park.

It added that the factories had only been closed temporarily.

Grassroots environmental activism is growing in China, with protests against polluting industries occurring frequently across the country.

Violent protests last week by thousands of people in the southwestern city of Shifang forced authorities there to cancel plans for a $1.6 billion heavy metals plant.

A new global study mapping human-animal diseases like tuberculosis (TB) and Rift Valley fever finds that an “unlucky” 13 zoonoses are responsible for 2.4 billion cases of human illness and 2.2 million deaths per year. The vast majority occur in low- and middle-income countries. The report, which was conducted by the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI), the Institute of Zoology (UK) and the Hanoi School of Public Health in Vietnam, maps poverty, livestock-keeping and the diseases humans get from animals, and presents a “top 20″ list of geographical hotspots.

“From cyst-causing tapeworms to avian flu, zoonoses present a major threat to human and animal health,” said Delia Grace, a veterinary epidemiologist and food safety expert with ILRI in Kenya and lead author of the study. “Targeting the diseases in the hardest hit countries is crucial to protecting global health as well as to reducing severe levels of poverty and illness among the world’s one billion poor livestock keepers.”

“Exploding global demand for livestock products is likely to fuel the spread of a wide range of human-animal infectious diseases,” Grace added.

According to the study, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Tanzania in Africa, as well as India in Asia, have the highest zoonotic disease burdens, with widespread illness and death. Meanwhile, the northeastern United States, Western Europe (especially the United Kingdom), Brazil and parts of Southeast Asia may be hotspots of “emerging zoonoses”-those that are newly infecting humans, are newly virulent, or have newly become drug resistant.

The study examined the likely impacts of livestock intensification and climate change on the 13 zoonotic diseases currently causing the greatest harm to the world’s poor.

The report, Mapping of Poverty and Likely Zoonoses Hotspots, was developed with support from the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID). The goal of the research was to identify areas where better control of zoonotic diseases would most benefit poor people. It also updates a map of emerging disease events published in the science journal Nature in 2008 by Jones et al.i

Remarkably, some 60 percent of all human diseases and 75 percent of all emerging infectious diseases are zoonotic. Among the high-priority zoonoses studied here are “endemic zoonoses,” such as brucellosis, which cause the vast majority of illness and death in poor countries; “epidemic zoonoses,” which typically occur as outbreaks, such as anthrax and Rift Valley fever; and the relatively rare “emerging zoonoses,” such as bird flu, a few of which, like HIV/AIDS, spread to cause global cataclysms.

While zoonoses can be transmitted to people by either wild or domesticated animals, most human infections are acquired from the world’s 24 billion livestock, including pigs, poultry, cattle, goats, sheep and camels.

Poverty, zoonoses and markets
Today, 2.5 billion people live on less than US$2.00 per day. Nearly three-quarters of the rural poor and some one-third of the urban poor depend on livestock for their food, income, traction, manure or other services. Livestock provide poor households with up to half their income and between 6 and 35 percent of their protein consumption. The loss of a single milking animal can be devastating to such households. Worse, of course, is the loss of a family member to zoonotic disease.

Despite the danger of zoonoses, the growing global demand for meat and milk products is a big opportunity for poor livestock keepers.

“Increased demand will continue over the coming decades, driven by rising populations and incomes, urbanization and changing diets in emerging economies,” noted Steve Staal, deputy director general-research at ILRI. “Greater access to global and regional meat markets could move millions of poor livestock keepers out of poverty if they can effectively participate in meeting that rising demand.”

But zoonoses present a major obstacle to their efforts. The study estimates, for example, that about one in eight livestock in poor countries are affected by brucellosis; this reduces milk and meat production in cattle by around 8 percent.

Thus, while the developing world’s booming livestock markets represent a pathway out of poverty for many, the presence of zoonotic diseases can perpetuate rather than reduce poverty and hunger in livestock-keeping communities. The study found a 99 percent correlation between country levels of protein-energy malnutrition and the burden of zoonoses.

“Many poor livestock keepers are not even meeting their own protein and energy needs,” said Staal. “Too often, animal diseases, including zoonotic diseases, confound their greatest efforts to escape poverty and hunger.”

Assessing the burden of zoonoses
The researchers initially reviewed 56 zoonoses that together are responsible for around 2.5 billion cases of human illness and 2.7 million human deaths per year. A more detailed study was made of the 13 zoonoses identified as most important, based on analysis of 1,000 surveys covering more than 10 million people, 6 million animals and 6,000 food or environment samples.

The analysis found high levels of infection with these zoonoses among livestock in poor countries. For example, 27 percent of livestock in developing countries showed signs of current or past infection with bacterial food-borne disease-a source of food contamination and widespread illness. The researchers attribute at least one-third of global diarrheal disease to zoonotic causes, and find this disease to be the biggest zoonotic threat to public health.

In the booming livestock sector of developing countries, by far the fastest growing sectors are poultry and pigs. “As production, processing and retail food chains intensify, there are greater risks of food-borne illnesses, especially in poorly managed systems,” said John McDermott, director of the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health, led by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

“Historically, high-density pig and poultry populations have been important in maintaining and mixing influenza populations. A major concern is that as new livestock systems intensify, particularly small- and medium-sized pig production, that more intensive systems will allow the maintenance and transmission of pathogens. A number of new zoonoses, such as Nipah virus infections, have emerged in that way.”

Intensification and disease spread
The most rapid changes in pig and poultry farming are expected in Burkina Faso and Ghana in Africa and India, Myanmar and Pakistan in Asia. Pig and poultry farming is also intensifying more rapidly than other farm commodity sectors, with more animals being raised in more concentrated spaces, which raises the risk of disease spread.

Assessing the likely impacts of livestock intensification on the high-priority zoonoses, the study found that livestock density is associated more with disease “event emergence” than with overall disease burdens.

Both the northeastern United States and Western Europe have high densities of livestock and high levels of disease emergence (e.g., BSE, or “mad cow” disease, and Lyme disease), but low numbers of people falling sick and dying from zoonotic diseases. The latter is almost certainly due to the relatively good disease reporting and health care available in these rich countries.

Bovine tuberculosis is a good example of a zoonotic disease that is now rare in both livestock and human populations in rich countries but continues to plague poor countries, where it infects about 7 percent of cattle, reducing their production by 6 percent. Most infected cattle have the bovine form of TB, but both the human and bovine forms of TB can infect cows and people.

Results of this study suggest that the burden of zoonotic forms of TB may be underestimated, with bovine TB causing up to 10 percent of human TB cases. Human TB remains one of the most important and common human diseases in poor countries; in 2010, 12 million people suffered from active disease, with 80 percent of all new cases occurring in 22 developing countries.

Massive underreporting
“We found massive underreporting of zoonoses and animal diseases in general in poor countries,” said Grace. “In sub-Saharan Africa, for example, 99.9 percent of livestock losses do not appear in official disease reports. Surveillance is not fulfilling its purpose.”

The surveillance lacking today will be even more needed in the future, as the climate changes, she added. Previous research by ILRI and others indicates that areas with increased rainfall and flooding will have increased risk of zoonoses, particularly those diseases transmitted by insects or associated with stagnant water or flooding.

The main finding of the study is that most of the burden of zoonoses and most of the opportunities for alleviating zoonoses lie in just a few countries, notably Ethiopia, Nigeria, and India. These three countries have the highest number of poor livestock keepers, the highest number of malnourished people, and are in the top five countries for both absolute numbers affected with zoonoses and relative intensity of zoonoses infection.

“These findings allow us to focus on the hotspots of zoonoses and poverty, within which we should be able to make a difference,” said Grace.