The panzootic spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 sublineage 2.3.4.4b: a critical appraisal of One Health preparedness and prevention.

Changes in the epidemiology and ecology of H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza are devastating wild bird and poultry populations, farms and communities, and wild mammals worldwide. Having originated in farmed poultry, H5N1 viruses are now spread globally by wild birds, with transmission to many mammal and avian species, resulting in 2024 in transmission among dairy cattle with associated human cases. These ecological changes pose challenges to mitigating the impacts of H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza on wildlife, ecosystems, domestic animals, food security, and humans.

The Impact of the Novel Coronavirus Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) Pandemic on Case Fatality Rates and Cost of Surgical Care in Brazil.

Background The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic provoked disruptions in healthcare delivery. Following the recommendations of major surgical societies and surgical departments globally, most surgeries were widely canceled or postponed, causing significant disruptions to healthcare delivery worldwide, including in Brazil. Brazil's public healthcare system - Sistema Único de Saúde (SUS) was particularly affected, with a substantial decline in elective procedures, especially during the pandemic's early stages.

Temporal Trends of Age-Adjusted Mortality Rates for Rheumatic Heart Disease in Brazil From 2000 to 2021.

Background Rheumatic heart disease (RHD) is a chronic cardiovascular condition stemming from an infectious origin, posing a substantial health burden, particularly in economically disadvantaged regions. It starts with acute rheumatic fever (ARF), a complication following group A Streptococcus infection, leading to heart valve damage and, over time, structural heart abnormalities. RHD contributes to premature deaths, especially in low-middle-income countries.

Recent Developments and Challenges in Projecting the Impact of Crop Productivity Growth on Biodiversity Considering Market-Mediated Effects.

The effect of an increase in crop productivity (output per unit of inputs) on biodiversity is hitherto poorly understood. This is because increased productivity of a crop in particular regions leads to increased profit that can encourage expansion of its cultivated area causing land use change and ultimately biodiversity loss, a phenomenon also known as "Jevons paradox" or the "rebound effect". Modeling such consequences in an interconnected and globalized world considering such rebound effects is challenging.

Developing One Health surveillance systems.

The health of humans, domestic and wild animals, plants, and the environment are inter-dependent. Global anthropogenic change is a key driver of disease emergence and spread and leads to biodiversity loss and ecosystem function degradation, which are themselves drivers of disease emergence. Pathogen spill-over events and subsequent disease outbreaks, including pandemics, in humans, animals and plants may arise when factors driving disease emergence and spread converge.

Indicators to monitor the status of the tree of life.

Following the failure to fully achieve any of the 20 Aichi biodiversity targets, the future of biodiversity rests in the balance. The Convention on Biological Diversity's Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) presents the opportunity to preserve nature's contributions to people (NCPs) for current and future generations by conserving biodiversity and averting extinctions. There is a need to safeguard the tree of life-the unique and shared evolutionary history of life on Earth-to maintain the benefits it bestows into the future.

Sustainable Food Systems: The Way Forward in the Indian Context.

Current Indian food system is not sustainable as it fails to fulfil its primary function of delivering adequate nutrition to its population while causing high environmental impacts along with widespread poverty among farmers. Here, we discuss how recent research has enabled quantification of a country's current food system sustainability through multiple indicators across nutrition, environmental, and economic dimensions. This data can be used by policy makers, farmers, businesses, consumers, and other stakeholders to make scientific evidence-based informed decisions regarding which diets and food items to promote or discourage in near future to make progress towards sustainability.

Template for Evaluating Cradle-to-Site Environmental Life Cycle Impacts of Buildings in India.

A massive amount of building construction is expected in economically developing nations such as India over the next few years. The first step in ensuring that the new construction takes place in a sustainable manner is the knowledge about the building's impact on multiple environmental domains. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a promising tool for this, but its application in the Indian construction sector is hampered by a lack of access to detailed inventory data on amounts of all building materials used and the per unit environmental footprints of individual materials (characterization factors).

Thermal degradation model of used surgical masks based on machine learning methodology.

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has leveraged facial masks to be one of the most effective measures to prevent the spread of the virus, which thereby has exponentially increased the usage of facial masks that lead to medical waste mismanagements which pose a serious threat to life. Thermal degradation or pyrolysis is an effective treatment method for the used facial mask wastes and this study aims to investigate the thermal degradation of the same.

Methods: Predicted the TGA experimental curves of the mask components using a Machine Learning model known as Artificial Neural Network (ANN).

Global importance of Indigenous Peoples, their lands, and knowledge systems for saving the world's primates from extinction.

Primates, represented by 521 species, are distributed across 91 countries primarily in the Neotropic, Afrotropic, and Indo-Malayan realms. Primates inhabit a wide range of habitats and play critical roles in sustaining healthy ecosystems that benefit human and nonhuman communities. Approximately 68% of primate species are threatened with extinction because of global pressures to convert their habitats for agricultural production and the extraction of natural resources.

A secondary assessment of sediment trapping effectiveness by vegetated buffers.

Vegetated buffers and filter strips are a widely used Best Management Practice (BMP) for enhancing streamside ecosystem quality and water quality improvement through nonpoint source pollutant removal. Most existing studies are either site-specific, rely on limited data points, or evaluate buffer width and slope as the only design variables for predicting sediment reduction, not considering other parameters such as soil texture, vegetation types, and runoff loads that can significantly influence the buffer efficiency. In this paper, we carry out a meta-analysis of published studies and fit regression models to explore the sediment removal capacity of riparian buffers.

Nutrient Adequacy of Global Food Production.

A major challenge for countries around the world is to provide a nutritionally adequate diet to their population with limited available resources. A comprehensive analysis that reflects the adequacy of domestic food production for meeting national nutritional needs in different countries is lacking. Here we combined national crop, livestock, aquaculture, and fishery production statistics for 191 countries obtained from UN FAO with food composition databases from USDA and accounted for food loss and waste occurring at various stages to calculate the amounts of calories and 24 essential nutrients destined for human consumption.

A metric for spatially explicit contributions to science-based species targets.

The Convention on Biological Diversity's post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework will probably include a goal to stabilize and restore the status of species. Its delivery would be facilitated by making the actions required to halt and reverse species loss spatially explicit. Here, we develop a species threat abatement and restoration (STAR) metric that is scalable across species, threats and geographies.

Current and future trends in socio-economic, demographic and governance factors affecting global primate conservation.

Currently, ~65% of extant primate species ( 512 species) distributed in 91 countries in the Neotropics, mainland Africa, Madagascar, South Asia and Southeast Asia are threatened with extinction and 75% have declining populations as a result of deforestation and habitat loss resulting from increasing global market demands, and land conversion for industrial agriculture, cattle production and natural resource extraction. Other pressures that negatively impact primates are unsustainable bushmeat hunting, the illegal trade of primates as pets and as body parts, expanding road networks in previously isolated areas, zoonotic disease transmission and climate change. Here we examine current and future trends in several socio-economic factors directly or indirectly affecting primates to further our understanding of the interdependent relationship between human well-being, sustainable development, and primate population persistence.

How to transition to reduced-meat diets that benefit people and the planet.

Overwhelming evidence shows that overconsumption of meat is bad for human and environmental health and that moving towards a more plant-based diet is more sustainable. For instance, replacing beef with beans in the US could free up 42% of US cropland and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 334 mmt, accomplishing 75% of the 2020 carbon reduction target. We summarise the evidence on how overconsumption of meat affects social, environmental and economic sustainability.

Country-Specific Sustainable Diets Using Optimization Algorithm.

Current diets of most nations either do not meet the nutrition recommendations or transgress environmental planetary boundaries or both. Transitioning toward sustainable diets that are nutritionally adequate and low in environmental impact is key in achieving the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. However, designing region-specific sustainable diets that are culturally acceptable is a formidable challenge.

Dietary Change Scenarios and Implications for Environmental, Nutrition, Human Health and Economic Dimensions of Food Sustainability.

Demand side interventions, such as dietary change, can significantly contribute towards the achievement of 2030 national sustainable development goals. However, most previous studies analysing the consequences of dietary change focus on a single dimension of sustainability (e.g.