Sunak Flunked It

Over £26bn for new roads.

Just £1bn for low carbon transport.

Once again the Tories have proved either they don't get climate change, or they don't care because it'll be our children's problem. This first budget of the new administration has already proved to be a massive lost opportunity and the Chancellor has barely sat down.

This country is hosting COP26 in November at which it is hoped that tight and binding pledges to tackle the climate crisis will be agreed. It looks as though the UK will be leading from the rear.

SHAMEFULL!

Forensic DNA-based Genealogy - Prospects Outside US

The heat and noise generated around the use of DNA-based genealogical research to identify people (specifically in criminal investigations) has been centred on the US, simply because the available DNA databases there are so large compared with anywhere else.

Now, Tim Clayton, John Cleery, Maurice Gleeson, Debbie Kennet, Michelle Leonard and Donna Rutherford have show that in some cases there is sufficient information out there for some UK persons to be identifiable. It's easiest if I just paste in their paper's abstract:

The use of genetic genealogy techniques to identify Joseph James DeAngelo as the prime suspect in the Golden State Killer case in 2018 has opened up a new approach to investigation of cold cases. Since that breakthrough, genetic genealogy methods have been reported to be applied to around 100 cases. To date, all of these reports relate to investigations in the US, where the high uptake of “direct-to-consumer” (DTC) genetic testing by individuals conducting private ancestral research has provided the necessary publicly available data for successful forensic investigations. We have conducted a study to assess the likely effectiveness of genetic genealogy techniques if applied to investigations in the UK. Ten volunteers provided their own SNP array data, downloaded from a DTC provider of their choice. These data sets were anonymised and uploaded to the GEDmatch Genesis genealogy website, mimicking data sets from unsourced crime samples or unidentified human remains. A team of experienced genealogists then attempted to identify the donors of the anonymised data sets by working with matches on the database and identifying points where the matches’ trees intersect to determine their shared family lineages which were further investigated using traditional resources (such as birth, marriage, death and census records, social media and online family trees). Through these methods, four of the ten donors were identified, at least to the level of one of a set of siblings. This confirms that, despite the over-representation of US citizens on publicly accessible genealogy databases, there is still potential for effective use in investigations outside the US where legislation permits. One of our four identified individuals was of Indian heritage (via St Vincent and the Grenadines) highlighting that in the right circumstances individuals of non-European origin can be identified.

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Coronavirus - Testing

In a minor attempt at combating some of the spurious social media output I'm reproducing here an article from the New Scientist:

Think you might be infected with coronavirus? Here’s what to do and how the test works.

Because infected people may have anything from severe pneumonia to no symptoms at all, the only way to confirm that someone is infected is to test them for the virus.

If you suspect that you are infected, current official advice is that you shouldn’t go to a hospital or to a doctor. You could infect other people including much-needed healthcare workers. Contact your local health authority and follow their advice. In the UK, call 111 or go to this website.

Several countries including the UK are testing only people who have symptoms of covid-19 and have either been in close contact with someone confirmed to have the disease, or have been to an area with a widespread covid-19 outbreak.

These criteria can lead to cases being missed, because people don’t always know if, say, they have been in contact with a confirmed case. The US has said it wants testing to be more widely available, and some are calling for it to be free, as it already is in many countries including the UK.

But testing based on symptoms alone would be too broad, given covid-19 has similar symptoms to many common respiratory illness. “I am not sure what other criteria you could use,” says Mark Woolhouse of the University of Edinburgh, UK. “The symptoms are too non-specific; we’d end up testing millions of people.”

Based on 55,000 confirmed cases in China, 90 per cent of people with covid-19 develop a fever, 70 per cent have a dry cough, 40 per cent feel very tired and 30 per cent cough up sputum. Rarer symptoms include shortness of breath, sore throat, headache, muscle or joint pains, nausea or vomiting, blocked nose and diarrhoea.

Testing involves taking a swab of the nose or throat and samples of sputum if you are coughing it up. You may also have blood drawn and tested. This may be done at your home or in a drive-through site.

In the lab, technicians look for genetic sequences specific to the coronavirus. Because the virus’s genome is made of RNA, this involves first turning the RNA into DNA. Some labs say they have developed tests that can produce results in a little as three hours, but it will usually take longer to get results.

These tests are not entirely reliable. “One or more negative results do not rule out the possibility of covid-19 virus infection,” says the WHO guidance on lab testing.

This can be due to technical problems, such as not keeping samples refrigerated, but it also has to do with the nature of viral infections. Someone who has only just been infected may not yet be shedding the virus into the throat, while someone at a late stage may have stopped doing so, while still having an active infection in other parts of the body.

Looking for genetic sequences also cannot identify people who have been infected and fully recovered. Many labs are trying to develop tests for the antibodies our immune system produce to defend against the coronavirus, which our bodies keep making even after the virus is eliminated.

An antibody test could reveal whether or not lots of people get very mild infections that are going unnoticed. That would mean the case fatality rate could be significantly lower than the current estimate of around 1 or 2 per cent.

Finally, even if you think you only have a cold or flu, health providers often recommend that it is best to self-isolate if you can. Reducing the spread of other respiratory viruses will help ease the burden on health services, and make it easier to identify those who do have covid-19.

COVID-19: Did We Miss A Trick In 2013?

I've only just spotted this. A couple of weeks ago the New Scientist contained a short article explaining that Zheng-Li Shi and her team at the Wuhan Institute of Virology had detected a coronavirus in bats in 2013 which it now transpires is 96% identical to COVID-19. Shi had shown that this virus could infect human cells in the lab. Furthermore in 2016 Wayne Marasco and colleagues at Harvard Medical School found that this virus could replicate in human airway cells. Further research was hampered by the US government's ban on work that alters viruses in ways that might make them more dangerous - an admirable goal but perhaps one that requires a certain amount of nuancing? Only last year Shi warned that it was highly likely that coronavirus outbreaks would originate in bats in China. She had earlier demonstrated that such viruses are capable of passing directly from bats to people living near their caves without the need for an intermediary species.

This only strengthens the case for more public money to be put towards research in this area.

Hydrogen As A Fuel Could Increase NOx levels

I vaguely remember years ago when I worked for the CEGB some co-researchers were looking into the design of burners that minimised the production of nitrogen oxides. If I remember rightly there was particular concern that the corner-fired boilers at Aberthaw Power Station would be difficult to manage.

Be that as it may. Today, the New Scientist reports (I think this will be behind a pay-wall) that an unpublished study by Defra posits that use of hydrogen for space heating (as a means of lowering CO2 emissions) could have the effect of raising NOx production.

The report also cites a number of other potential unintended consequences of moving to low CO2 technologies. However, my quick reading of the NS summary suggests to me that the possible problems are manageable, maybe won't occur anyway, and are a price worth paying for combating climate change.

Coronaviruses

2003: SARS

2012: MERS

2019: COVID-19

The warning signs have been there for 16 years. Why no vaccines? Why are we so unprepared? Money and complacency.

Money: There was no market for a catch-all coronavirus vaccine after the relatively short-lived SARS and MERS episodes so no commercial drug company would go all out to develop one. And no national health authority/government would fund the research.

Complacency: SARS was a one-off, wasn't it? MERS was a one-off wasn't it? COVID-19...…..

The current outbreak has the potential to be really nasty. The death rate seems to be around 1 in 100. That's around about the same as the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. Think on't.

And even if we get away with this one; what about the next...……………..?

The Importance of the Heathrow Decision

My brain is on go-slow - I had not thought through the implications of the recent Heathrow court case. Fortunately George Monbiot, among others, has done so. The gist of the argument, just as with Heathrow, is that decisions on major infrastructure projects must take into account the government's policy on climate commitments even though the projects themselves are consistent with existing policy statements in other areas.

Monbiot highlights, for instance, the stupidity of Andrea Leadsom approving the new gas power scheme at Drax saying that the energy policy statement comes first regardless of the resultant climate impacts.

Another example comes from the national policy statement on road networks which insists that "any increase in carbon emission is not a reason to refuse development consent". What??

This government urgently needs to get its policies straight. Climate change is an existential threat. Climate impacts should be the very first consideration when any new project comes forward.