Archive for the ‘Disease and Pandemics’ Category

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‘Red Tide’ Strikes Texas Coast

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

By David L. Brown

“Red Tide.” It may sound like the title for the latest Tom Clancy novel, but it’s a very real phenomenon. I observed its effects today on the Texas Gulf Coast as evidenced by tens of thousands of dead fish littering the beaches of Padre Island.

Beach dunes along the Gulf of Mexico, Padre Island

So-called red tides are caused by blooms of algae that deplete oxygen and in some cases yield toxins that are fatal to fish, birds and other animals living in or near the water. According to locals, the present outbreak began about a month ago and is the first to strike the region in about four years. Red tides develop quickly and dissipate as the algae uses up existing nutrients and oxygen and proceeds to die off. Little is understood about the causes of the blooms, which are named for the discoloration in the water that sometimes takes place, often reddish but sometimes green or brown. Warnings had been posted against consuming oysters and other mollusks that could be contaminated with toxins produced by the algae.

Padre Island is a long barrier island extending along the Texas coast from Corpus Christi south to near the Mexican border. It is a favorite recreational area, and yet when I visited the Padre Island National Seashore headquarters today there were few tourists and a hostess told me it was as quiet as she had ever seen it.

I strolled along the beach observing tiny crabs scuttling for shelter as I approached and seabirds clustering at the water’s edge in search of their lunch. Arrayed in a band near what must have been the previous high water mark were thousands of dead fish of all sizes, from minnows to fairly large mullet. Here is a photo showing some of the dead fish I observed.

Dead fish resulting from red tide, Padre Island

Although algae blooms sometimes result from runoff of agricultural fertilizer, this is by no means the only cause. The phenomenon has been observed for thousands of years and appears in many parts of the world.

Posted in Disease and Pandemics, Ocean Depletion, Pollution | Comments Off

The Tragedy of the Bat

Monday, April 5th, 2010

By David L. Brown

01_fungusbatBats have always gotten a bum rap. These furry little flying creatures have been associated with vampires, witches and ghouls for generations, and they’re the first to be blamed for rabies and other diseases. In fact, nearly all bats are harmless and do much good for humanity. The only exception is the vampire bat of Central and South America, a blood sucking species. Most bats are either insectivores or fruit-eaters, and the North American varieties are generally good neighbors, not fearsome monstrosities as many people imagine.

Now, bats are in trouble. So-called white nose syndrome is caused by a fungus that grows a white coating on the muzzles of bats and results in their death. It’s spreading from the Northeastern U.S., where it was first noticed near Albany, NY, in 2006. So far, the little brown bat has been the major victim of the widening plague, but other species also seem to be at risk. The photo at left shows an infected bat with the fungus in evidence not only on its muzzle but on its wings and ears as well.

According to an article in New Scientist magazine, the suspect in the disease is the fungus itself, Geomyces destructans, although scientists speculate that it may be a secondary opportunity infection riding piggy-back on some other disease pathogen.

Unlike many if not most people, I have a warm place in my heart for bats, which I have often observed in their busy evening task of swooping up millions of mosquitoes. Back in my youth I belonged to the University of Missouri campus spelunking club. (That’s a fancy name for cave exploring.) We used to crawl, wade, raft, or rappel into holes in the ground as a form of weekend sport, but also for science because we searched out and mapped caves in the limestone-rich region of central Missouri.

I have two personal anecdotes to report relative to bats. First is a memory of a late afternoon when I emerged after a lone venture into a  cave that was host to a large colony of bats. As I walked toward the oval opening, facing west across a small valley, sunset was fading and twilight was descending. The bats were beginning to stir, and soon I was standing in the mouth of the cave in the midst of a stream of bats leaving for the evening. Hundreds of them were swooping and dodging around me, a virtual river of bats, as I stood with my hands stretched overhead.

Yes, I realize that for some of you this would have been a nightmare scenario, but to me it was a marvelous experience of nature. The bats, of course, have built-in sonar navigation systems that would make a submariner jealous. They would never hit someone, any more than they collide with each other or run into the sides of their cave. The sonar is so good they can zero in on insects as tiny as gnats and mosquitoes, which are their foods of choice.

The second anecdote is a sad one. We once owned a house in Prescott, Arizona, in the high Ponderosa pine country. It featured a deck with a western view, and my wife and I enjoyed sitting there at dusk watching the bats swoop and dodge, catching the mosquitoes that would otherwise be feasting on us. The little colony of bats had found a home beneath the roof eaves of our house, and we were glad to have them there.

After a few years we moved away, but kept the house and rented it out. It wasn’t long before I got a call from the rental agent. The new tenants had complained that the house was “infested with bats,” and were insisting that an exterminator be hired to eliminate them. “Infested!” I cried. “Those are our bats!” I asked him to explain to the tenants, but nevertheless the ignorant fools insisted that the bats be killed. To this day I hope they were eaten alive by mosquitoes every time they tried to enjoy the deck. Disgusted, when the tenant’s lease ran out we insisted that they leave (they didn’t want to, but life is sometimes cruel) and sold the house. I still have bittersweet memories of those bats and their evening acrobatics.

Anyway, there’s my little collection of bat stories. They are often maligned, feared, and murdered for no good reason. In reality, they are an important part of the natural cycle of nature, helping to control those flying insects that, ironically, do suck our blood.

Posted in Disease and Pandemics, Diversity Loss, Extinction | Comments Off

Ug99 Poised on Afghan Border

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

By David L. Brown

I have written several times over the past few years about the spreading threat of Ug99, a wheat stem rust disease first identified in Uganda in 1999. It is a serious threat not only to wheat, but also related barley and rye varieties. Spores carried by the wind have been spreading Ug99 toward the major wheat growing regions stretching from Iran through Afghanistan and the other “Stans” and eventually to India and China. All of these nations are seriously dependent upon wheat crops to support their people. This disease does more than just reduce yields—it destroys entire crops. Agronomists are struggling to find or breed resistant varieties to replace the threatened “staff of life,” the mainwheat-beautiful source of food for about a third of the world’s people from southern Europe through China. The “bounteous waves of grain” as pictured here and that provide all-important food for a third of the world’s people are under serious threat.

Now the ugly disease has reached the border of Afghanistan and is poised to enter that nation, already in a state of chaos. Afghans are dependent upon two crops, wheat and opium poppies—and you can’t live on a diet of opium, or at least not for long.

According to a recent news item in New Scientist magazine, Afghan farmers harvested a bumper crop this year, thanks to timely Spring rains. But, the article continued, “… the beleaguered country can’t rest easy. The Ug99 wheat rust, a virulent fungus that wipes out entire crops, is poised to cross the border from Iran.”

The article, which appeared in the August 8, 2009 edition, continued:

Fungal spores have been spreading on the wind from Uganda, where the disease was first discovered in 1999. They reached the wheat fields of Iran two years ago, prompting scientists to warn that millions in Asia were at risk of starvation. If the epidemic reaches Afghanistan, its effects would be catastrophic. “Nearly all farmers in Afghanistan grow wheat for food or sale,” says Mahmood Osmanzai, a scientist working for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in the country. Most of the wheat varieties grown in Afghanistan, and indeed around the world, are vulnerable to Ug99.

I’ve been reporting on this threat since my first post on the subject on August 31, 2006. For more details about the threat of this “ugly” wheat disease, read earlier posts here, here, and here.

In a world besieged by climate change, a spreading disease with the ability to destroy small grain crops is the last thing we need. Australia, formerly a leading exporter of foodstuffs, has been suffering long-standing drought conditions, and the wheat growing region of China has been similarly struck with dry conditions. Waving fields of grain are being replaced by dust storms reminiscent of the Dust Bowl Days of the U.S.

Afghanistan, with a population of around 30 million, is in serious danger of famine should the wheat crop fail. World stocks of grain and other foodstuffs are at record low levels, and aid agencies and foreign governments could be hard pressed to fill the shortage in case of  a devastated Afghan wheat crop. But that is a minor problem compared with the looming threat when (not if) Ug99 spreads through Pakistan and northern India and China, where more than two billion people are heavily dependent upon wheat as “the staff of life.” These three nations rank No. 1,2 and 6 in the world by population.

There is real fear that the Ug99 strain of wheat stem rust may find its way into North America. A spreading plague of plant disease across the wheat growing regions of the U.S. and Canada could mean disaster for a world already teetering on the brink of famine.

I’ll keep watching this important subject, which seems to attract little attention from the conventional media.

Posted in Agriculture Issues, Disease and Pandemics, Famine | Comments Off

Ug99 Wheat Disease Is ‘Quite the Deal’

Friday, June 26th, 2009

By David L. Brown

The wheat fungus known as Ug99 continues to threaten the world’s “Staff of Life” and could destroy up to four-fifths of the world’s wheat crop, according to this article on the Ottawa Citizen online site. The effects are already being felt in shortages and higher prices for bread, pasta and dumplings on which about a third of the world’s people rely as a major source of nutrition.

The fungus, known as Ug99 for having been first observed in Uganda ten years ago, has “so far proved unstoppable,” the article says, quoting Canadian officials. According to the Citizen story:

The fungus is now threatening areas that account for more than one-third of the world’s wheat production, and scientists in North America say it’s only a matter of time before the pest hits the breadbasket regions of North America, Russia and China.

I first reported on this nearly three years ago (“A Looming Threat to World Food Supply?,” August 31, 2006, link here), and followed up on March 19, 2008 with a second essay (“Ugly Times Ahead as Death Spores Spread,” link here.) That second essay was accompanied by a map showing how Ug99 had spread more rapidly than expected, from out of Africa to the Mideast and threatening the southern Asia wheat growing region.

Folks, this is a truly serious threat to human existence. Literally hundreds of millions and perhaps a billion or more lives may be at stake if the world’s wheat crop suffers widespread destruction. As the article in the Ottawa paper shows, the effects of the plant disease are already being felt and are poised to reach new heights.

To see how serious this is, here is a Google Maps representation of the paths Ug99 has taken out of Africa. It now has Pakistan, India and China in its sights.

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Oddly, I have seen little news coverage about this devastating disease, one that potentially could rival the Black Death and Spanish Flu in its impact upon human life. In fact, considering today’s far larger world population the number of deaths that might result could be far beyond anything in history.

We need to pay serious attention to this developing disaster. According to Rob Graf, an Alberta plant scientist quoted in the Citizen article: “I think it’s important people start recognizing what a big threat this is. This could mean world famine. This is quite the deal.”

Yes, it is “quite the deal” indeed. As I wrote in 2008:

Let’s be clear on this: Ug99 doesn’t just represent an inconvenient disease that might reduce yields somewhat. It is a fungus that totally destroys wheat wherever it appears, as surely as a wildfire or plague of locusts. And not only that, it seems that many varieties of barley and oats are also susceptible to being destroyed by Ug99. And as I reported in 2006, plant scientists warn that at least two other similar plant diseases called stripe rust and leaf rust “also loom large” as threats to the world’s grain supply.

This could be the biggest “story” of the 21st Century, a period that future historians may describe as a time of unprecedented famine. And yet… How much do we see in the press or on network TV about this developing disaster, something that should be one of the biggest stories of our time? How many of our “leaders” are scrambling to help prepare against the threat? Well, basically the answers to those questions are “little” and “none”. Today, for example, the world press is falling all over itself to report on the death of a notorious pop singer. Yesterday it was the infidelity of a pathetic state governor. These are events of little import that shall soon be forgotten,  like pimples on elephants when set against the potential for widespread famine. Even the recent swine flu kerfluffle fades to insignificance beside the ongoing spread of Ug99.

I can imagine news executives and politicians saying, “Nobody wants to hear about famine.” But it’s coming, and not just because of Ug99. There are other factors at work to reduce the world’s supply of food, most of them related to Peak Oil and the population explosion. All of modern industrial agriculture was built on a foundation of cheap and plentiful energy, and as production costs rise in line with  energy prices and declining resources, food will become more expensive, more scarce, and less available to the poorest humans. That’s a recipe for disaster even without the added complication of Ug99.

So, it’s back to our regular programming, the mind-numbing pabulum being served up to keep the people of the world from falling into panic. Just keep moving folks, nothing to see here.

Posted in Disease and Pandemics, Famine | Comments Off

Preparing for Triage in a Pandemic

Monday, May 5th, 2008

By David L. Brown

You are probably familiar with the term “triage,” a French word to describe the process of dividing battlefield casualties into three categories in order to apply medical services efficiently. Triage separates the wounded into those who are beyond help; those who do not need immediate attention; and those who do require immediate attention in order to survive.

We have written here before about the possibility of what might happen in case a pandemic of avian flu or some other virus should strike the world. Now it appears that the U.S. government is thinking about what kind of response might be required. The story appears on the FoxNews.com site today under the headline “Government Report Answers Who Lives, Who Dies in Flu Pandemic.”

According to the article, a panel of medical experts convened as a task force has outlined a kind of triage process to determine who should receive hospital help and who should not in case of a pandemic. To summarize, those who are to be denied medical care during a pandemic include: People over 85 years old; those with severe injuries; severely burned patients older than 60; those with severe mental impairment such as advanced Alzheimer’s, and those with serious chronic diseases such as “advanced heart failure, lung disease or poorly controlled diabetes.”

The Fox report asks the question: “Should doctors be allowed to play God?” Well, I have news for them, and that is that doctors are always in the position of having to make life or death decisions when choices must be made. They are not “playing” at anything, but generally just trying to do the best job they can in difficult circumstances.

Here is more from the FoxNews.com report:

The proposed guidelines are designed to be a blueprint for hospitals “so that everybody will be thinking in the same way” when pandemic flu or another widespread health care disaster hits, said Dr. Asha Devereaux. She is a critical care specialist in San Diego and lead writer of the task force report.
The idea is to try to make sure that scarce resources — including ventilators, medicine and doctors and nurses — are used in a uniform, objective way, task force members said.

Their recommendations appear in a report appearing Monday in the May edition of Chest, the medical journal of the American College of Chest Physicians.

“If a mass casualty critical care event were to occur tomorrow, many people with clinical conditions that are survivable under usual health care system conditions may have to forgo life-sustaining interventions owing to deficiencies in supply or staffing,” the report states.

Now for a bit of cynical commentary. The vision of what a true pandemic would be like in today’s world, and the manageable situation that seems to be envisioned by this panel of experts, are quite a bit apart. The report makes the whole thing seem like a minor outbreak of disease, what is called an epidemic. And of course, a flu epidemic would be a serious thing indeed.

But what we are talking about here is not an epidemic at all, but a pandemic, and that is quite a different thing. The medical dictionary on MedicineNet.com defines it this way:

Pandemic: An epidemic (a sudden outbreak) that becomes very widespread and affects a whole region, a continent, or the world.

By contrast: An epidemic affects more than the expected number of cases of disease occurring in a community or region during a given period of time. A sudden severe outbreak within a region or a group as, for example, AIDS in Africa or AIDS in intravenous drug users.

So a pandemic is a sort of mega-epidemic, and if one were to occur here in the U.S. I suggest that the medical community would be completely unable to deal with it. Even now, hospitals have only about as many beds as they can keep filled under normal circumstances. Due to economic factors staffing in most hospitals has been cut to the bone in most facilities.

The last serious pandemic was that of the so-called Spanish Flu, in 1918-20. It is estimated that 2.5 to 5 percent of all human beings on Earth died from this scourge, perhaps as many as 100 million. In the U.S. alone, about 28% of the population were infected by the virus and 500,000 to 675,000 died.

(more…)

Posted in Disease and Pandemics, Population Issues | 1 Comment »

Ugly Times Ahead as Death Spores Spread

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

By David L. Brown

Back in August, 2006 I wrote about the danger posed by an emerging plant disease called Ug99. This virulent form of wheat rust appeared in 1999 in Uganda from where it has slowly spread into Kenya and Ethiopia. It was expected to eventually cross the Red Sea, travel north, and at some future time reach the vast wheat growing areas of south Asia unless solutions could be found.

In my article, “A Looming Threat to World Food Supply?” (you can find it by using the search field at upper right), I warned of a potential plant pandemic that could destroy “the staff of life” in broad regions, leading to widespread famine and death by starvation.

In that article 19 months ago I quoted Dr. Norman Borlaug, winner of the Nobel Prize and known as the “father of the Green Revolution,” who said: “Stem rusts like Ug99 are catastrophic diseases because they cause complete annihilation of wheat crops over wide areas. The prospect of this disease becoming an epidemic in Africa, Asia and the Americas is real and must be stopped before it causes untold human suffering.”

I also noted that “plant scientists and seed producers are running scared to find resistant varieties before a global pandemic can become a reality,” and quoted from a scientific report which concluded that “because Ug99 has broken down the source of stem rust resistance that has protected much of the world’s wheat for 30 years, the crop is poised for an epidemic to spread like wildfire.”

Well, Ug99 is on the move, and faster than predicted or expected by plant scientists. According to an article in the latest issue of New Scientist magazine:

A WHEAT disease that could destroy most of the world’s main wheat crops could strike south Asia’s vast wheat fields two years earlier than research had suggested, leaving millions to starve. The fungus, called Ug99, has spread from Africa to Iran, and may already be in Pakistan. If so, this is extremely bad news, as Pakistan is not only critically reliant on its wheat crop, it is also the gateway to the Asian breadbasket, including the vital Punjab region.

The sudden jump was the result of airborne spores being carried by a major cyclone last June. Here is a map showing the path that Ug99 has taken toward the heart of the Asian wheat regions:

26474401.jpg

As the map shows, Ug99 was expected to take a roundabout path to south Asia, first traveling northward from Yemen before moving across Turkey into northern Iran. Instead, thanks to Cyclone Gonu last Summer it appears it has taken a fast track straight across the Arabian Peninsula into central Iran and possibly beyond. The inset shows the major wheat growing regions that stretch from France to central India, all now in the path of the spreading spores.

The New Scientist article continues:

Scientists met this week in Syria to decide on emergency measures to track Ug99′s progress. They hope to slow its spread by spraying fungicide or even stopping farmers from planting wheat in the spores’ path. The only real remedy will be new wheat varieties that resist Ug99, and they may not be ready for five years. The fungus has just pulled ahead in the race.

Ug99, a virulent strain of black stem rust (Puccinia graminis) was identified in Uganda in 1999. Since then it has invaded Kenya and Ethiopia and, last year, Yemen. From previous fungal invasions, scientists expected the prevailing winds to carry Ug99 spores to Egypt, Turkey and Syria, and then east to Iran, a major wheat-grower, buying them some time. But on 8 June 2007, Cyclone Gonu hit the Arabian peninsula, the worst storm there for 30 years.

“We know it changed the winds,” says Wafa Khoury of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, because desert locusts the FAO had been tracking in Yemen blew north towards Iran instead of north-west as expected (see Map). “We think it may have done that to the rust spores.” This means, she says, that Ug99 has reached Iran a year or two earlier than predicted. The fear is that the same winds could have blown the spores into Pakistan, which is also north of Yemen, and where surveillance of the fungus is limited.

Let’s be clear on this: Ug99 doesn’t just represent an inconvenient disease that might reduce yields somewhat. It is a fungus that totally destroys wheat wherever it appears, as surely as a wildfire or plague of locusts. And not only that, it seems that many varieties of barley and oats are also susceptible to being destroyed by Ug99. And as I reported in 2006, plant scientists warn that at least two other similar plant diseases called stripe rust and leaf rust “also loom large” as threats to the world’s grain supply.

(more…)

Posted in Agriculture Issues, Disease and Pandemics | 1 Comment »

‘Bird Flu’ Pandemic Is One Step Closer

Thursday, October 4th, 2007

By David L. Brown

We have not written recently about avian flu, but you can bet we have been keeping an eye on this potential threat to humanity. Now, a story from Reuters (read it here) indicates that a recent mutation in the H5N1 virus responsible for the disease makes it possible for it to thrive in the upper respiratory tract of human beings. This is an ominous step toward making the so-called “bird flu” a large-scale threat to humankind. Here is an excerpt from the report:

The H5N1 bird flu virus has mutated to infect people more easily, although it still has not transformed into a pandemic strain, researchers said on Thursday.

The changes are worrying, said Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“We have identified a specific change that could make bird flu grow in the upper respiratory tract of humans,” said Kawaoka, who led the study.

“The viruses that are circulating in Africa and Europe are the ones closest to becoming a human virus,” Kawaoka said.

So far the virus still cannot be easily be transmitted between people, but until now a major explanation for that fact has been its inability to grow except deep in the human lungs. Now that barrier has been breached.

How deadly could this influenza be if it should make the final step or steps to become easily transmitted between humans? Well, consider that the last major pandemic, the Spanish Flu of 1918-9, killed perhaps 50 to 100 million people, possibly more than the infamous Black Death. That pandemic, caused by the H1N1 strain of the influenza virus, killed as few as 2 percent and certainly no more than 20 percent of those infected.

Now consider that of the 329 people known to have been infected with H5N1 by contact with birds since the avian flu appeared in 2005, 201 have died. That is a chilling 61 percent mortality rate.

(more…)

Posted in Disease and Pandemics | 1 Comment »

Gorillas on the Brink

Friday, December 8th, 2006

by Val Germann

From the BBC this morning comes some bad news that many people had been expecting, though perhaps not so soon: the gorillas of Africa, under increasing pressure from habitat destruction and human predation, are now rapidly approaching extinction.  The final blow, however, is being delivered not by human beings but by ebola. 

More than 5,000 gorillas may have died in recent outbreaks of the Ebola virus in central Africa, a study says.  Scientists warn that, coupled with the commercial hunting of gorillas, it may be enough to push them into extinction.  

The lesson here is a hard one: by the time we humans figure out there is a problem in the natural world things are likely very far along.  In fact, they are probably so far along that the ’the full exponential stage’ has been reached, with the badness increasing so rapidly that no remedy exists. 

We might all think about this, and about the gorilla, as we read the headlines about climate change.  The bell could one day be tolling for us, too, and not that far down the road.

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Posted in Disease and Pandemics, Diversity Loss, Extinction | Comments Off

A Looming Threat to World Food Supply?

Thursday, August 31st, 2006

By David L. Brown

What would happen if our world, supporting a bloated and still growing population on the slender legs of a few monocultural crops, should be faced with a pandemic? No, I’m not talking about avian flu or any other animal or human disease, but a potential pandemic of plant disease that could attack a major food source.

According to recent statistics, cereal grain crops — primarily wheat, rice and corn (also known as maize) — provide 47 percent of the calories consumed by human beings worldwide, and 42 percent of protein. That’s right, cereal grains and mostly from just three crops, account for nearly half of the nutrition that supports more than 6.5 billion people.

And because of the intensive plant breeding that has produced the high-yielding varieties that made the Green Revolution possible, most native plants with their differing qualities of disease resistance have been replaced by one-size-fits-all varieties. That leaves a disproportionate amount of the worldwide grain crop potentially susceptible to a pandemic of disease that could spread from nation to nation with disastrous effects.

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Posted in Agriculture Issues, Disease and Pandemics | 2 Comments »

China’s “Miracle” Brings Second-Law Payback

Wednesday, June 14th, 2006

by Val Germann

The breakneck speed of China’s economic “development” is continuing to visit Second-Law effects on the Land of the Middle Kingdom. It’s enough to bring a crocodile tear to the eye of this child of the 1950′s, who remembers Tom Lehrer’s song about a California future in which everything is fine, “as long as you don’t drink the water, or breath the air.” China is just about there, now.

Here’s a quote from an article appearing yesterday on THE INDEPENDENT‘s website:

Sometimes the smog enveloping Beijing is dry and tinged with yellow; on other days it’s a misty kind of soup. In the early summer there are the sandstorms which whip up dust bearing poisonous particles.

All three kinds of pollution leave you with sore eyes, feeling a bit chesty, and prone to all kinds of infections, from cold sores to flu.

Yes, indeed, the air and water in China give a whole new meaning to the idea of unhealthy:

The World Bank, which says 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities are in China, estimates that 400,000 people here die a year from air pollution-related illnesses.

Of course, that’s not very many funerals when the total population is over ONE BILLION, but it gets some attention here at Star Phoenix Base. To paraphrase the late Illinois Senator Everett Dirkson (my father’s mother went to grade school with him!): “A hundred thousand here, a hundred thousand there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real numbers!” Yes, you are, and in response to all this bad air and water, China seems to have a budding, if late-arriving, environmental movement:

People all over the country have rioted and held demonstrations over pollution damaging their crops in the countryside and affecting children’s health. Smog is a much bigger issue among Chinese people than democracy, internet freedom, censorship or the right to worship. Breathing comes first.

Ordinarily, yes, breathing WOULD come first. But breathing doesn’t generate any foreign exchange, and therein lies the problem.

Read THE INDEPENDENT’s article here.

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Posted in Conservation Issues, Desertification and Soil Loss, Disease and Pandemics, Economics, Environmental Activism, Fossil Fuels, Pollution | 1 Comment »

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