Human antibodies made in genetically engineered cows have proved safe in an early stage clinical trial, U.S. scientists said on Wednesday, and could be developed into a treatment for the fatal viral disease, MERS.

MERS, or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, is a SARS-like viral infection first identified in Saudi Arabia in 2012 that has caused deadly outbreaks in the Middle East as well as sporadic cases around the world.

Despite more than five years of waves of infection, no effective treatment or vaccine has been developed against MERS, which has a 35 percent case fatality rate and has so far killed at least 740 people worldwide.

More than 80 percent of MERS cases have been reported in Saudi Arabia, according to the World Health Organization.

In research published in the Lancet Infectious Diseases journal on Wednesday, scientists found that human antibodies called SAB-301 generated in so-called transchromosomic cattle — animals with human DNA incorporated into their genome — were safe in healthy volunteers.

The antibodies also persisted for more time than the MERS virus typically remains in the body, the study found, with antibodies still detected in bloodstream after 90 days.

This points a way ahead for the antibodies — which offer immunity against an invading infection — to be tested in further trials in people infected with MERS, the researchers said.

“This is the first study to show the safety and immune effects of a potential treatment for MERS,” said John Beigel at Leidos Biomedical Research, who co-led the U.S. government-funded study. “The data from our study suggest that SAB-301 is safe, and further research into the treatment is warranted.”

The idea of using human antibodies has developed in recent years in a variety of severe and emerging diseases, including flu, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), MERS and Ebola.

Blood plasma harvested from people whose immune systems have successfully fought the disease contains the right antibodies and can be given to other patients to help their immune systems fight the virus.

But harvesting human plasma is not always easy or swift when a new disease emerges, so scientists turned to the idea of transchromosomic cattle as a way of manufacturing specific antibodies in larger amounts.

Transchromosomic cattle have human DNA that codes for human antibodies incorporated into their genome. To make SAB-301, they were injected with a part of the MERS virus, stimulating their immune systems to produce antibodies against it. The antibodies were then extracted from the cattle’s blood and purified.

“The process of creating antibody treatments by harvesting antibodies from human donors is slow and often small-scale,” said Beigel. “However, the cattle-produced antibodies could be created as soon as three months.”
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Failure to rein in global temperature rises could cause the marine food web to collapse, devastating the livelihoods of tens of millions of people who rely on fisheries for food and income, scientists have warned.

Warming oceans restrict vital energy flows between different species in the marine ecosystem, reducing the amount of food available for bigger animals — mostly fish — at the top of the marine food web, according to a study in the journal PLOS Biology published Tuesday.

This could have “serious implications” for fish stocks, said Ivan Nagelkerken, a professor of marine ecology at Australia’s University of Adelaide and one of the study’s authors.

Globally, about 56.5 million people were engaged in fisheries and aquaculture in 2015, according to the latest data from the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

In addition, almost a fifth of animal protein consumed by 3.2 billion people in 2015 comes from fish, FAO said.

The Adelaide scientists set up 12 large tanks, each holding 1,800 liters of water, in a temperature-controlled room to replicate complex marine food webs, and test the effects of ocean acidification and warming over six months.

Plant productivity increased under warmer temperatures but this was mainly due to an expansion of bacteria which fish do not eat, Nagelkerken said in a phone interview.

The findings show that the 2015 Paris agreement on curbing global warming must be met “to safeguard our oceans from collapse, loss of biodiversity and less fishery productivity.”

Under the landmark agreement, world leaders agreed to limit the rise in average global temperatures to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times.

The United Nations, however, has warned the world is heading toward a 3-degree increase by 2100.

Recent studies have sounded alarm bells for oceans and its inhabitants as the Earth continues to experience record-breaking heat.

A Jan. 4 paper published in the journal Science said “dead zones” — where oxygen is too low to support most marine life — more than quadrupled in the past 50 years due to human activities.

Another said high ocean temperatures are harming tropical corals, which are nurseries for fish, almost five times more often than in the 1980s.
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Honeybees are attracted to a fungicide used in agriculture with “unsettling implications” for global food production, a scientist said Tuesday.

Tests carried out by a team from the University of Illinois showed bees preferred to collect sugar syrup laced with the fungicide chlorothalonil over sugar syrup alone.

The finding follows other studies linking fungicides to a worldwide plunge in honeybee and wild bee populations that are crucial for pollinating crops.

“Bees are kind of like humans in that they sometimes like things that aren’t necessarily good for them,” said University of Illinois entomology professor May Berenbaum, who led the research.

She said fungicides were bad news for bees because they could exacerbate the toxicity of pesticides and kill off beneficial fungi in hives.

Her team set up two feeding stations in an enclosure allowing the bees to choose sugar syrup laced with a test chemical or without. The chemicals included three fungicides and two herbicides at various concentrations.

The researchers were taken aback to find the bees choosing one of the fungicides.

Expanation for contamination

“It was a surprise when they actually liked them,” Berenbaum told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone, adding that it could explain why fungicide contamination in hives was so common.

“This is not anything that anyone had even thought about before, so we need to readjust our focus because there certainly could be implications for agriculture,” she said.

However, she said the bees actively avoided a second tested fungicide and were neutral about a third.

The scientists said the findings were “worrisome” in light of research showing fungicides interfere with honeybees’ ability to metabolize pesticides used by beekeepers to kill parasitic mites that infest their hives.

The scientists were also surprised to find the bees showed a taste for the widely used herbicide glyphosate.

A study by the Center for Biological Diversity last year said hundreds of native bee species in North America and Hawaii were sliding toward extinction.

It said bees provided more than $3 billion in fruit-pollination services each year in the United States.

Experts have blamed habitat loss, heavy pesticide use, climate change and increasing urbanization for declining numbers.

The United Nations recently announced an annual World Bee Day on May 20 to raise awareness of their importance and declining numbers.
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With their alpine grasslands shrinking due to erratic rainfall and glacier retreat, herders in Peru’s central Andes have decided that the future lies in reviving the past.

To improve access to water and save their livestock, indigenous communities in the villages of Canchayllo and Miraflores have restored abandoned dams, reservoirs and canals that date back over 3,000 years.

Two years on from completion of the project — supported by The Mountain Institute (TMI), a U.S.-based non-profit — there are more and better quality pastures for sheep, cattle and alpaca to graze, and milk, meat, and crop yields have risen.

The project’s success, benefiting 9,600 people in the Nor Yauyos Cochas Landscape Reserve, has raised hopes for thousands of highland communities in Peru and elsewhere who are facing similar climate pressures, said Florencia Zapata of TMI, which works with mountain communities.

It could also have far-reaching impacts along the desert coast, home to almost 70 percent of the population, which receives less than 2 percent of Peru’s available water.

“Water that most of the population depends on comes mainly from the mountains. So, we need to take care of (that water),” Zapata, who oversaw the project, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview.

The western ranges of the “brown” Andes — with a marked dry season — are dotted with remains of ancient infrastructures dedicated to managing water, said Jorge Recharte, director of TMI’s Andes program.

The ranges extend to Bolivia, Chile and Argentina and while some water structures are still in use, knowledge and understanding of them had started to vanish as populations dwindled due to migration to the cities, Recharte said.

Peru’s glaciers are a source of fresh water for millions of people but they have diminished by 40 percent since the 1970s, government figures showed.

The South American country is home to 70 percent of the world’s tropical glaciers, which are “especially sensitive to warming temperatures”, the United Nations warned.

Fears over the melting of an Andean glacier has even led to an intercontinental lawsuit that environmentalists are watching closely.

“As glacier retreat progresses and climate change kicks in … new lands are becoming available for agriculture in the Andes,” said Alexander Herrera, an archaeologist and associate professor at Colombia’s Universidad de los Andes.

“Learning from the past is absolutely crucial for sustainable, low-risk, productive agriculture (of the kind) the Andes have had for thousands of years,” said Herrera, who was involved in the Canchayllo and Miraflores projects.

Grey and green

Peru has a long history of embarking on engineering feats to manage the flow of water for agriculture.

The Incas and the civilisations before them built terraces, cisterns and canals while modern government projects include the $500-million Olmos and the stalled Chavimochic III irrigation projects.

It was at one of the first meetings TMI organised in 2013 that locals raised the possibility of rehabilitating the neglected pre-Inca hydraulic structures.

Designed to slow the movement of water through grasses and soils, they replenished aquifers and springs and helped the grasslands retain more water, allowing biodiversity to flourish.

This way, the ecosystem acted as a buffer against flooding and drought and provided fodder for their animals, who in turn produce cheese and importantly manure, used to cultivate “thousands of native potato, corn, tuber and grain varieties,” Zapata said.

The restoration and adaptation of ancient terraces and canals for modern use has been pioneered by British archaeologist Ann Kendall since the late 1970s.

But other attempts by Andean governments and aid groups in the 1980s to revive these technologies for development failed because the focus was more on techniques and less on the needs of the locals, said archaeologist Herrera.

In Canchayllo and Miraflores, the restoration has combined ancient and modern technologies to meet the demands of herders, after months of consultation.

The restored systems incorporate “grey” infrastructure such as PVC pipes, water valves and fences and “green” elements such as restoration of grasslands and wetlands.

The restoration minimised the need for regular maintenance work since labor is in short supply, with the young and able moving to cities for better jobs.

“It is not enough to just improve their infrastructure or water availability. If people are not organised to manage the infrastructure, it will collapse sooner or later,” Zapata said.

Not another burden

Julio Postigo, a Peruvian expert on pastoralism in high altitudes, said poor, marginalised communities needed support from government to revive the ancient structures — just as families were supported centuries ago.

“We tend to forget, when we romanticise these Inca or pre-Inca or ancient responses, that they were never taken by individual families,” said Postigo, a senior research scientist at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. “You’re talking about an empire that decided that that infrastructure was going to be built.”

TMI said it was looking to train and work with the Peruvian government and other organisations to replicate the success of projects in central Peru.

But reviving ancient water systems must be part of a wider plan to help communities cope with climate change, said Postigo.

“The people most vulnerable to climate change effects are those who are poorer, less educated, more marginal, indigenous,” he said in a phone interview. “We should fight poverty and improve living conditions. In doing so, those populations will be on a better foot to respond to climate change.”
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From gritty neighborhoods in New York and Los Angeles to clinics in Kenya and Brazil, health workers are trying to popularize a pill that has proven highly effective in preventing HIV but which – in their view – remains woefully underused.

Marketed in the United States as Truvada, and sometimes available abroad in generic versions, the pill has been shown to reduce the risk of getting HIV from sex by more than 90 percent if taken daily. Yet worldwide, only about a dozen countries have aggressive, government-backed programs to promote the pill. In the U.S., there are problems related to Truvada’s high cost, lingering skepticism among some doctors and low usage rates among black gays and bisexuals who have the highest rates of HIV infection.

“Truvada works,” said James Krellenstein, a New York-based activist. “We have to start thinking of it not as a luxury but as an essential public health component of this nation’s response to HIV.”

A few large U.S. cities are promoting Truvada, often with sexually charged ads. In New York, “Bare It All” was among the slogans urging gay men to consult their doctors. The Los Angeles LGBT Center – using what it called “raw, real language” – launched a campaign to increase use among young Latino and black gay men and transgender women.

“We’ve got the tools to not only end the fear of HIV, but to end it as an epidemic,” said the center’s chief of staff, Darrel Cummings. “Those at risk have to know about the tools, though, and they need honest information about them.”

Truvada in the U.S.

In New York, roughly 30 percent of gay and bisexual men are using Truvada now, up dramatically from a few years ago, according to Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, a deputy commissioner of the city’s health department.

However, Daskalakis said use among young black and Hispanic men – who account for a majority of new HIV diagnoses – lags behind. To address that, the city is making Truvada readily available in some clinics in or near heavily black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

“We like to go to the root of the problem,” said Daskalakis, who personally posed for the “Bare It All” campaign.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , Truvada would be appropriate for about 1.2 million people in the U.S. – including sex workers and roughly 25 percent of gay men. Gilead Scientific, Truvada’s California-based manufacturer, says there are only about 145,000 active prescriptions for HIV prevention use.

Under federal guidelines, prime candidates for preventive use of Truvada include some gay and bisexual men with multiple sexual partners, and anyone who does not have HIV but has an ongoing sexual relationship with someone who has the virus.

An international approach 

Abroad, a few government health agencies – including those in France, Norway, Belgium, Kenya, South Africa, Brazil and some Canadian provinces – have launched major efforts to promote preventive use of Truvada or generic alternatives, providing it for free or a nominal charge. In Britain, health officials in Scotland and England recently took steps to provide the medication directly through government-funded programs, though in England it’s in the form of a trial limited to 10,000 people.

Truvada was launched in 2004, initially used in combination with other drugs as the basic treatment for people who have HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. It is primarily spread through sex.

Controversy arose in 2012 when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Truvada to reduce the risk of getting HIV in the first place, for what’s called pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP. It blocks the virus from making copies and taking hold. Critics warned that many gay men wouldn’t heed Truvada’s once-a-day schedule and complained of its high cost – roughly $1,500 a month.

Gilead offers a payment assistance plan to people without insurance that covers the full cost. Some cities and a few states – including Illinois, Massachusetts and Washington – also help cover costs. Activists have pressed Gilead to make its copay program more generous in light of its profits from Truvada.

“There’s no reason it has to cost so much,” said Krellenstein.

Gilead spokesman Ryan McKeel, in an email, said the company is reviewing the copay program.

“Like those in the advocacy community, we are committed to expanding access to Truvada for PrEP to as many people as possible,” he wrote.

In June, the FDA approved a generic version of Truvada, which is likely to push the price down, but it won’t be available in the U.S. for a few years.

The Truvada debate has taken many twists, as exemplified by the varying stances of the Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation – a leading HIV/AIDS service provider. In 2012, the group unsuccessfully petitioned the FDA to delay or deny approval of Truvada for preventive use. The foundation’s president, Michael Weinstein, belittled Truvada as “a party drug” and warned it would increase the spread of sexually transmitted infections by encouraging men to engage in sex without condoms.

But last year, the foundation, while still skeptical about some Truvada-related policies, urged Gilead to cut its price to make it more available.

“We have no dispute about its ability to prevent HIV transmission,” said spokesman Ged Kenslea. He noted that the organization’s 40 pharmacies across the U.S. handle many Truvada prescriptions.
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