Our understanding of the global ecology of influenza viruses is impeded by historically low levels of viral surveillance in Africa. Increased genetic sequencing of African A/H1N1 pandemic influenza viruses during 2009-2013 revealed multiyear persistence of 2 viral lineages within West Africa, raising questions about the roles of reduced air traffic and the asynchrony of seasonal influenza epidemics among West African countries in the evolution of independent lineages. The potential for novel influenza virus lineages to evolve within Africa warrants intensified influenza surveillance in Africa and other understudied areas.
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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4162001 | PMC |
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/infdis/jiu047 | DOI Listing |
Nat Commun
January 2025
Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, 70118, USA.
Mercury (Hg) contamination poses a persistent threat to the remote Arctic ecosystem, yet the mechanisms driving the pronounced summer rebound of atmospheric gaseous elemental Hg (Hg) and its subsequent fate remain unclear due to limitations in large-scale seasonal studies. Here, we use an integrated atmosphere-land-sea-ice-ocean model to simulate Hg cycling in the Arctic comprehensively. Our results indicate that oceanic evasion is the dominant source (~80%) of the summer Hg rebound, particularly driven by seawater Hg release facilitated by seasonal ice melt (~42%), with further contributions from anthropogenic deposition and terrestrial re-emissions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFScience
January 2025
Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL, Birmensdorf, Switzerland.
Persistent multiyear drought (MYD) events pose a growing threat to nature and humans in a changing climate. We identified and inventoried global MYDs by detecting spatiotemporally contiguous climatic anomalies, showing that MYDs have become drier, hotter, and led to increasingly diminished vegetation greenness. The global terrestrial land affected by MYDs has increased at a rate of 49,279 ± 14,771 square kilometers per year from 1980 to 2018.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Am Mosq Control Assoc
January 2025
Invasive organisms may cause ecologic, economic, and public health harm. Aedes japonicus is an invasive mosquito species of known ecologic and public health importance that has widely spread throughout the eastern USA since initially being recognized in Connecticut in 1998. Here, we report the known distributions of Ae.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Bull (Beijing)
December 2024
NOAA/Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, Seattle, Washington DC 20005, USA.
El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) exhibits a strong asymmetry between warm El Niño and cold La Niña in amplitude and temporal evolution. An El Niño often leads to a heat discharge in the equatorial Pacific conducive to its rapid termination and transition to a La Niña, whereas a La Niña persists and recharges the equatorial Pacific for consecutive years preconditioning development of a subsequent El Niño, as occurred in 2020-2023. Whether the multiyear-long heat recharge increases the likelihood of a transition to a strong El Niño remains unknown.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Nat Resour Agric Ecosyst
January 2024
Office of Research and Development, USA Environmental Protection Agency, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, USA.
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