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LIFESCIENCE: super toys l;astall life long

 
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ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL 99
LIFESCIENCE
Linz, Austria, September 04 - 09
http://www.aec.at/lifescience
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Satellites help predict disease outbreaks - report

                          Updated 2:17 PM ET July 16, 1999

 By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent

 WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Outbreaks of disease can be
 predicted months in advance using satellite images and other
 climate data, researchers said Friday.

 By analyzing information collected by a U.S. government weather
 satellite, a team of scientists studied the density of green vegetation
 in Africa to predict outbreaks of Rift Valley Fever, which can kill
 livestock and humans.

 Kenneth Linthicum of the Walter Reed Army Institute of
 Research and colleagues found the amount of green vegetation
 was a reliable indicator of rainfall, which in turn, predicted the rise
 and fall of mosquito populations.

 In Africa, rainfall encourages mosquitoes, which carry Rift Valley
 Fever, a hemorrhagic disease spread from livestock to humans by
 mosquitoes or by contact with infected animals. In 1998 the
 disease killed more than 600 people in Kenya.

 Examining the weather and climate data could be used to warn
 about a range of diseases and could improve efforts to warn of
 drought, flood and other disasters, the researchers said.

 "Several climate indices can be used to predict outbreaks up to 5
 months in advance," they wrote in their report, published in Friday's
 issue of the journal Science.

 "For the first time we now have 18 or 19 years of data," Compton
 Tucker of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland,
 who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview.

 "We have satellite data and ground-based data and the actual
 documentation of the presence of the disease from traditional
 medical sources. So all these things have sort of come together."

 The team compared measurements of sea temperatures, including
 the El Nino-southern oscillation weather patterns -- which increase
 rain in some regions of East Africa and result in droughts in
 southern Africa -- to their satellite data and information about past
 outbreaks of Rift Valley Fever.

 The associations were clear and will be easy to predict in the
 future, the researchers said.

 Paul Epstein of Harvard Medical School, who wrote a
 commentary on the study, said the findings will greatly help efforts
 to predict outbreaks not only of Rift Valley Fever, but of other
 insect-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever.

 "You can distribute bed nets and pesticides and medicines and
 make a dramatic decrease in the amount of expected malaria," he
 said in a telephone interview.

 In South America it is drought that allows mosquitoes to breed. "In
 Colombia, El Nino is usually associated with drought, which in
 mountainous areas dries up streams and makes breeding sites for
 malaria and dengue fever," Epstein said.

 In the United States, he said, the data could be used to predict a
 rise in hantavirus, an untreatable and deadly virus carried by
 rodents whose victims' fluid-filled lungs often drown them.

 "In the southwest we had a tremendous drought in Arizona,
 Nevada, all through the spring. Right now there is flooding in the
 Grand Canyon and flooding in Las Vegas. This drought punctuated
 by rain is a perfect situation for an explosion in the mouse
 population. We should be getting our vigilance up for mice and
 hantavirus in the southwest," Epstein said.

 Satellite measurements could even be used to predict cholera
 outbreaks, Epstein said. Data from instruments that measure
 temperature and algae concentrations could show where conditions
 are right for cholera, which is often spread in polluted seawater. 

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