Re: Dust Storms Overseas Carry Contaminants to U.S. Scientists Study Whether Disease

[Guest guest]

did anyone watch 6 degrees on nat.geo. ?

pretty sad what's may be in the near future.

--- In , " tigerpaw2c " <tigerpaw2c@...>

wrote:

>

> Dust Storms Overseas Carry Contaminants to U.S.

> Scientists Study Whether Diseases Are Also Transported

> Washington Post*

> By Doug Struck

> Washington Post Staff Writer

> Wednesday, February 6, 2008

>

>

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2008/02/05/AR2008

> 020502950.html?hpid=moreheadlines & sub=AR

>

> Seventy-five years ago, aviator Lindbergh turned the

> controls of his pontoon plane over to his co-pilot, wife Anne

Morrow

> Lindbergh, while flying above Iceland. He thrust a makeshift metal

> arm holding a sticky glass plate from the cockpit. He wanted to see

> if the winds high aloft the Earth were as clean as they seemed.

>

> They were not.

>

> Now, with NASA satellites and sampling by researchers around the

> world, scientists know that great billowing clouds of dust waft

over

> the oceans in the upper atmosphere, arriving in North America from

> deserts in Africa and Asia.

>

> Researchers have also found that the dust clouds contain not only

> harmful minerals and industrial pollutants, but also living

> organisms: bacteria, fungus and viruses that may transmit diseases

> to humans. Some say an alarming increase in asthma in children in

> the Caribbean is the consequence of dust blown from Africa, and

> predict they will find similar connections in the Southeast and

> Northwest United States.

>

> Scientists are beginning to look at these dust clouds as possible

> suspects in transcontinental movement of diseases such as influenza

> and SARS in humans, or foot-and-mouth disease in livestock. Until

> recently, epidemiologists had looked at people, animals and

products

> as carriers of the diseases.

>

> " We are just beginning to accumulate the evidence of airborne dust

> implications on human health, " said A. Sprigg, a climate

> expert at the University of Arizona. " Until now, it's been like the

> tree falling in the forest. Nobody heard, so nobody knew it was

> there. "

>

> The World Meteorological Organization, a science arm of the United

> Nations, is alarmed enough to set up a global warning system to

> track the moving clouds of dust and to alert those in the path.

> Sprigg is heading the project.

>

> He foresees a system soon in which forecasters can predict " down to

> the Zip code " the arrival of dust clouds. That forecast could

prompt

> schools and nursing homes to keep their wards inside, and help

> public health doctors predict a surge of respiratory complaints.

>

> Analysis of soil samples has long shown that minerals picked up

from

> barren deserts reach distant shores, for good or bad. The Amazon

> rain forest in South America, for example, gets phosphate nutrients

> from dust blown in from northern Africa's Sahara Desert.

>

> Industrial development has added heavy metals and toxic chemicals

to

> that airborne mix. Korea and Japan periodically chafe as storms

> of " Yellow Dust " wash over from China, bringing a caustic mix of

> sand and industrial pollutants.

>

> Even natural minerals can be harmful to humans, and dust-borne

> particles have been linked to annual meningitis outbreaks in Africa

> and silicosis lung disease in Kazakhstan and North Africa. The Dust

> Bowl storms of the 1930s in the United States brought graphic

> descriptions of choking sediment getting into the lungs of people

> and felling livestock.

>

> But the advent of satellite images gave scientists a sobering look

> at how even faraway storms can reach us.

>

> Traveling for a week over the Pacific from the Gobi and Taklimakan

> deserts in Asia, clouds carrying hundreds of millions of tons of

> dust regularly reach the northwestern United States. From the

Sahara

> and Sahel deserts in Africa and the East, they roll across the

> Atlantic to the Caribbean and reach the southeastern United States

> in three to five days.

>

> Authorities in Los Angeles estimate that on some days, one-quarter

> of the city's smog comes from China.

>

> " There is plenty of evidence from space observations of the

Northern

> Hemisphere that there is a persistent ring of industrial emission

> dust and other pollutants in the air. You can actually see this

> bathtub ring around the Northern Hemisphere, " said Stanley A.

> Morain, who heads the Earth Data Analysis Center at the University

> of New Mexico and collaborates with Sprigg.

>

> " If something breaks out, it can move very quickly into other

> areas, " he said.

>

> Dust storms may be increasing as global warming and desertification

> expand arid areas. The dust swirls into the atmosphere containing

> plant pollens, fungal spores, dried animal feces, minerals,

> chemicals from fires and industry, and pesticide residues.

>

> Asthma in the Caribbean increased just as an African drought

> increased the amount of dust washing over the islands. Asthma has

> increased in Barbados 17 times since 1973, when the African drought

> began, according to a national study there, and researchers have

> documented an increase in pediatric hospital admissions when the

> dust storms are worst.

>

> Scientists previously had thought bacteria and viruses picked up by

> the dust storms would die on long flights, when they are exposed to

> ultraviolet radiation and extreme temperatures. But three-inch

> African locusts have been found alive in the Caribbean after dust

> storms.

>

> In the late 1990s, Eugene Shinn, who was studying the widespread

die-

> off of Caribbean coral reefs for the U.S. Geological Survey in

> Florida, began wondering if smaller living organisms came with the

> dust. He eventually linked live microbes brought from Africa to sea

> fan disease, which was infecting the coral.

>

> Shinn enlisted USGS microbiologist Dale . They and other

> colleagues devised a method of collecting air samples, using a

> contraption built with a vacuum pump from Home Depot drawing air

> through a two-inch round sterile filter.

>

> In the first test, collected during a dusty day in 2000 over the

> Virgin Islands, said he thought they might find evidence of

> four or five different microorganisms growing colonies on the

> filter. Instead, he found 30 colonies, each with billions of cells.

>

> " I did not expect that many, " he said. " And we know that whatever

> grows on the filter represents only about 1 percent of what's

really

> there. People just don't think about microorganisms moving around

> the atmosphere, at least that far. "

>

> said that " in Florida in the summer, when the dust storms

> are pulsing across, if you walk outside and breathe, 50 percent of

> the particles you breathe come from Africa, " more than 4,000 miles

> away. They contain mold spores and bacteria that increase allergies

> and respiratory diseases.

>

> Shinn, who is now retired, said that there has not been enough

> response to these findings.

>

> " No one in authority really wants to hear about this problem, even

> when it is known that African dust sporadically exceeds EPA air

> standards in places like Miami during the summer months, " Shinn

said

> in a letter recently. " No government agency wants to face this

> problem because no one knows what to do about it.

>

> " In my opinion, nothing will change regarding either African or

> Asian dust until we have a catastrophe such as a large-scale avian

> flu, West Nile virus, or some other deadly outbreak that cannot be

> explained away by the usual suspects, " he said. " Meanwhile we will

> continue to employ agents to check for fruit in baggage and dirt on

> tourists' shoes while hundreds of millions of tons of soil dust

> carrying live microbes continue to be transported unchecked

> overhead. "

>

> Unchecked, perhaps, but not unwatched. The early warning system

> being devised by Sprigg will track those storms, integrating the

> data with weather forecasts, so that local authorities have notice

> of one to three days to take precautions. Parts of the system have

> already been set up in China and Europe.

>

> In addition to medical precautions, police can be warned about

> deteriorating driving visibility and airports can plan to reroute

> planes, Sprigg said. He said he hopes the next step will be more

> aggressive medical research to determine the composition and human

> health threats of what is in those dust clouds.

>

> " I really see some practical applications here, " he said. " We are

> just getting started. "

>