ScienceInsider

by Jon Cohen and Martin Enserink

Health officials today reiterated that the novel H1N1 virus continues to spread rapidly around temperate zones of the Northern Hemisphere, hospitalizing and killing an unusual number of children, young adults, and pregnant women. The need for vaccine and antivirals remains pressing in these countries, and demand currently outstrips supply. Confusion also still complicates efforts to treat and prevent disease.

Between 1% and 10% of people who develop swine flu require hospitalization, according to a review of the current epidemiologic data released today by the World Health Organization (WHO). The new data were discussed 27–29 October at a meeting of WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) on Immunization. Up to 25% of hospitalized people are admitted to intensive care units, and between 2% and 9% die. Pregnant women make up 7% to 10% of hospitalized patients.

In a departure from official recommendations made elsewhere, SAGE announced that people regardless of age need only one dose of the H1N1 vaccine. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that children under 10 receive two doses. After the European Medicines Agency’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use meeting 19–22 October, the agency recommended that everyone regardless of age receive two doses of the pandemic flu vaccines approved for use there. Granted, different vaccines are in use in different locales, but the differences reflect that data from clinical trials of various vaccines in a range of age brackets is still preliminary. And the dosing questions impact both the efficacy of the vaccines and their availability, given that they remain in short supply everywhere.

At a press conference held today by the CDC, its director, Tom Frieden, addressed the discrepancies about children under age 10. CDC based its decision for children under 10 to receive two doses on preliminary data from clinical trials of the vaccines being used in the United States, but he said more complete data should emerge soon. “Throughout this entire response, our approach is, look at the data and follow the data,” said Frieden.

Frieden also revealed new data about deaths in children.

by Eli Kintisch

An international commission is meeting until 6 November to discuss Antarctic fisheries policy; a consortium of conservationists, meanwhile, called this week for more research and monitoring of Antarctic krill populations, which are under pressure from fishing. They also want separate catch limits for coastal and pelagic areas, so that fishing vessels don't out compete seals and penguins.

New York, California, and 13 other states have sued Amgen over alleged kickbacks related to sales of Amgen's anemia drug, Aranesp. 

The Ocean Observatories Initiative will hold the first in a series of community workshops for scientists 11–12 November in Baltimore, Maryland.

An energy efficiency nut he sure is, that Secretary of Energy.

The main glitch from an otherwise solid Ares launch test the other day was the parachute.

(Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ideonexus/ / CC BY-SA 2.0 )

by Erik Stokstad

Congress wants the Department of Interior to figure out what it doesn't know about Arctic ecosystems in order to better plan for oil and gas exploration. Tucked into a House-Senate conference report (pdf) for the fiscal year 2010 Interior/Environment spending bill is language (after the jump) suggesting that the DOI's Mineral Management Service get an independent assessment (i.e. by the National Research Council) of data gaps about the biodiversity and functioning of coastal and marine ecosystems. There's no money provided.

Conservationists are happy about the call, but realistic. "They're only identifying the gaps, not filling them," says Stan Senner of Ocean Conservancy in Washington, D.C. "We can all acknowledge the need for more science guide all the decisions" that will need to be made about development.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/artic/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

by Michael Torrice

Researchers studying viruses in the environment are scrambling to stockpile tiny laboratory filters called Anodiscs after GE Healthcare announced it would stop making them at the end of the year.

Down to their last filters and with boxes on back-order, many labs have stopped ongoing research projects. Environmental microbiologist Jed Fuhrman of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles calls the situation a "nightmare" adding that his lab paused a 10-year project of collecting monthly virus samples from the waters between Los Angeles and nearby Catalina Island. The filter shortage "pretty much killed that project," Fuhrman says.

by John Travis

Illicit drugs, science and politics can be a volatile mix, no doubt. So it's not a total surprise that David Nutt, a respected psychopharmacologist at the Bristol outpost of Imperial College London, was canned today as the U.K. top drug advisor. His downfall was a paper in which Nutt argued that ecstasy and other drugs caused less harm than alcohol, although the researcher had clashed before with the government's drug policies.

Phil Willis, Chairman of the House of Commons science and technology committee, has already released a statement noting he asked the Home Secretary "for clarification as to why the distinguished scientist Sir David Nutt has been removed of duties as Chair of Advisory Council on Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) at a time when independent scientific advice to government is essential. It is disturbing if an independent scientist should be removed for reporting sound scientific advice."

by Eli Kintisch

Dan Reicher, former assistant U.S. secretary of energy and now director of climate change and energy initiatives at Google, testified yesterday as part of the Senate climate hearings and mentioned an innovative tool Google recently announced: Google PowerMeter. It's an effort by Google to allow individuals to see constant energy-efficiency stats. "The power of that kind of information in helping you make efficiency choices is incredible," Reicher told ScienceInsider.

PowerMeter hopes to capitalize on the so-called Prius effect. The top-selling hybrid car, researchers have learned, saves energy not only because it switches efficiently between gasoline and electric power but also because of its conspicuous control screen, allowing drivers to see their real-time gasoline efficiency. According to a review by the U.K.'s DEFRA environmental agency of smart metering in people's homes, the Prius effect deployed at home could save up to 15% on energy bills.

Presenting data from a smart meter, Google PowerMeter sits on your Google homepage or handheld device and provides monthly, weekly, and hourly updates as to energy efficiency. "Give people feedback and it becomes a game," says Google's Ed Lu, an applied physicist who runs the program.

(Photo Credit: Google)

by Jon Cohen

South African President Jacob Zuma unequivocally declared today that his country had to step up its efforts against HIV/AIDS. "We need to do more, and we need to do better, together," said Zuma in a speech to a meeting of the National Council of Provinces in Cape Town. "Let us resolve now that this should be the day on which we start to turn the tide in the battle against AIDS."

Zuma's declarations might seem like boilerplate in other countries, but they marked a sharp departure from his predecessor, Thabo Mbeki, who brought much criticism to South Africa by questioning the evidence that HIV truly caused AIDS. South Africa, which has 5.7 million HIV-infected people, more than any country in the world, was notoriously slow to begin using anti-HIV drugs both as treatments and as a way to slow spread from infected, pregnant women to their babies.

Zuma's words were celebrated by HIV/AIDS researchers, clinicians, and advocates around the world. "State supported AIDS denialism in South Africa is dead, deceased, kaput, finished, gone forever, banished!!!" wrote prominent South African advocate Nathan Geffen in a widely circulated e-mail. "We have won! Yahoo!!! I'm retiring."

The House of Representatives Science and Technology Committee's Energy and Environment Subcommittee held the first hearing on fusion energy in 13 years.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D–NV) cited four swine flu deaths in his state while blasting Republicans for blocking the nomination of Regina Benjamin, the White House pick for surgeon general.

Eight Baltic Sea States have joined research forces to create BONUS-169, a shared research effort supported by the European Community with a maximum of €50 million, as matching funds.

Happy Birthday Internet: Scientists sent the first message on ARPANET 40 years ago between the University of California, Los Angeles, and Stanford University.

Credit: Department of Energy

by Jocelyn Kaiser

The results are in for National Institutes of Health's much-discussed Challenge Grants, and the news is only slightly better than expected: The agency funded 840 projects, which puts the portion of the mind boggling 20,000-plus applications funded at around 4%. That's abysmal compared with the usual NIH grant success rate of around 20%. But it beats the 1%–2% (200–400 grants) that NIH originally said it would fund.

The data come from a preliminary report on how NIH spent the first half of its $10.4 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The tally comes to 12,788 grants funded for $4.35 billion in 2009. (Contracts add another $379 million.) Grant categories include previously reviewed proposals that just missed the cutoff for funding from NIH's regular budget, as well as extensions of existing projects (supplements and revisions). The dollar breakdown (see chart): $1.51 billion (34.7%) to administrative supplements, $1.43 billion (32.9%) to previously reviewed applications,  $1.15 billion (26.4%) to stimulus competitions, $218 million (5%) to competing revisions, and $45 million (1%) to summer supplements.

By Eli Kintisch

On Monday, the Department of Energy announced $151 million in grants for ARPA-E, its pie-in-the-sky, high-risk energy research program. Thirty-seven grantees got funded, and Energy Secretary Steve Chu said that the program would serve as a "bold, transformational" step and would "spur the next Industrial Revolution" of energy research. Three things about ARPA-E we've learned, and three questions that remain:

Energy Secretary Steve Chu is serious about shaping ARPA-E in the Bell Labs model. It's pretty rare that federal research managers will say publicly that they expect some of the work they are funding to fail. Usually, they support basic research that has value because it adds to the scientific literature, or they support commercial work that generally leads to products. ARPA-E is different: It supports potentially commercial work that may well crash and burn. As Chu sees it, the way to go is the Bell Labs model: Support a number of risky research projects run by highly talented scientists, and if one or two pan out, the whole effort is worth it.

There's a lot of pent-up interest in energy research, and it's coming from everywhere.