SOUTH AMERICA: Rich in Biodiversity, Lagging in Protection

South America is the only region that has not submitted a report of its actions in the last year to implement the Convention on Biological Diversity, although it accounts for 40 percent of the world’s plant and animal species and the deadline was Mar. 30.

"These reports are very important in order to combat threats against biodiversity," David Cooper, Programme Officer at the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) told IPS, referring to the fourth annual report, which none of the 12 countries of South America have presented.

Without their reports, there is no record of the actions, strategies and progress they have made toward the protection of biodiversity, which holds up regional progress on the issue, the experts complained.

Cooper and more than 30 representatives of South American governments, environmental groups and other other civil society organisations are in Lima participating in a high-level meeting to assess the region's progress and interests in relation to the CBD's 2010 biodiversity target to significantly reduce the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national level.

The two-day meeting at the headquarters of the Andean Community trade bloc ended Wednesday with a declaration on progress and limitations in reaching the target, and a list of priorities for action as the 2010 deadline looms.

The CBD, approved in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is the foremost instrument for stemming the loss of biological diversity and ensuring equitable and sustainable access to the resources and benefits of that wealth. To promote compliance with the Convention, the Countdown 2010 Initiative was created within the scope of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), in 2004 for Europe and in 2007 for Latin America.

There are 150 partners in the initiative, including government representatives, private companies and organisations around the world committed to curbing the loss of biodiversity.

"Biodiversity is a local issue for each country, but we share a common responsibility," Sebastian Winkler, the head of the Countdown 2010 Initiative and an adviser on European policy, told IPS.

"But as a region, Latin Ameria has not lived up to the commitments made in signing the Convention because so far, the countries have not reported on their national strategies, unlike Africa, for example," he said.

Winkler stressed that the countries of Latin America must make an effort to "monitor the present state of biodiversity and play a more active part in international processes."

South America not only possesses 40 percent of the planet’s biodiversity, but also 25 percent of the forests and 26 percent of the fresh water sources. This vast natural wealth has also made it one of the most vulnerable regions. Among the main threats that were pointed out at the Lima meeting were the impact of climate change which causes animal and plant species to die out, the uncontrolled extraction of natural resources and the modification of land use in the Amazon - that is, the expansion of areas devoted to agriculture and other productive activities to the detriment of the jungle.

Statistics on damage to biodiversity worldwide are worrying. According to the IUCN's Red List, last updated in 2008, there are 16,928 species threatened with extinction, equivalent to 38 percent of the species catalogued. Thirty-six million hectares of pristine forests have been lost every year since 2000.

The Andean Community, made up of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, has encouraged countries to create a regional policy to make progress on their commitments, although those involved have admitted that they will not be able to meet the target.

On Tuesday, the first day of the Lima meeting, a review of progress was carried out, which was far from encouraging, and preliminary priorities for 2010 were proposed. Among these were strengthening alliances between government and civil society representatives, defining indicators to measure progress on the commitments, and enlisting the private sector in the defence of biodiversity. Another proposal was to create communication strategies to spread simple, non-technical information, in order to involve the public in this global problem.

Can One Inherit the Happiness ?

A new study suggests that our feelings in our lifetime can affect our children.

Dr. Halabe Bucay suggests that a wide range of chemicals that our brain generates when we are in different moods could affect 'germ cells' (eggs and sperm), the cells that ultimately produce the next generation. Such natural chemicals could affect the way that specific genes are expressed in the germ cells, and hence how a child develops.

In his article in the latest issue of Bioscience Hypotheses, Dr Alberto Halabe Bucay of Research Center Halabe and Darwich, Mexico, suggested that the hormones and chemicals resulting from happiness, depression and other mental states can affect our eggs and sperm, resulting in lasting changes in our children at the time of their conception.

Brain chemicals such as endorphins, and drugs, such as marijuana and heroin are known to have significant effects on sperm and eggs, altering the patterns of genes that are active in them.
"It is well known, of course, that parental behavior affects children, and that the genes that a child gets from its parents help shape that child's character." said Dr. Halabe Bucay. "My paper suggests a way that the parent's psychology before conception can actually affect the child's genes."

"This is an intriguing idea" commented Dr. William Bains, Editor of Bioscience Hypotheses. "We wanted to publish it to see what other scientists thought, and whether others had data that could support or disprove it. That is what our journal is for, to stimulate debate about new ideas, the more groundbreaking, the better."

How Oil Gets Stuck Underground In Inaccessible Places

It is a mystery to many people why the world is running out of oil when most of the world’s oilfields have only been half emptied. However some of the oil that has been located is trapped as droplets of oil in small cavities in the surrounding rock or is stuck to the walls of the underground cavity and cannot be accessed by the techniques currently used in the oil industry.

Now, new research may have come up with an explanation as to where and how North Sea oil clings to underground rocks. This explanation could turn out to be the first step on the way to developing improved oil production techniques with the intent of increasing oil production from Danish oil fields.

A research group at the Nano-Science Center, part of the Institute of Chemistry at University of Copenhagen has investigated drill cores collected from North Sea oil fields using an atomic force microscope. Their investigations show that the spaces which contain oil have totally different surface qualities than expected from our knowledge of the minerals which make up the rock. The rocks which contain oil in the Danish part of the North Sea are primarily chalk – the same type of rock that the cliffs of Stevns and Møns are made of. Assistant Professor Tue Hassenkam lead the research, whose preliminary results were published in the respected scientific publication PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) this week. He says that this is the first time that investigations of this type have been carried out on chalk from an oil field in the North Sea.

'Previous investigations were carried out on the surface properties of pure mineral crystals. But our investigation has shown that this chalk has a different and more complex structure' says Tue Hassenkam.

The oil bearing layers in the subsurface are reminiscent of a sponge. The oil "hides" in tiny pores and gaps and only some of the oil can be pressed out of the chalk and into the borehole by injecting water into the chalk layer. The rest is left behind as small droplets of oil surrounded by water either in small gaps in the rock or stuck to the walls of the pores. The chalk particles ought to repel oil if they act like particles of the mineral calcite, which chalk is almost 100% made up of. However the new investigations, carried out with a particularly powerful microscope, have shown that the surfaces of the pores in the chalk are partially covered in a material which oil can stick to. Ass. Prof. Hassenkam believes that the surprising behaviour of the material in the surface of the chalk can be explained by studying how the chalk was formed.

'Chalk is actually the casings of ancient algae. The algae gave their cases a type of "surface coating" to make them resistant to water. And it is probably this surface coating that we can see in action here, even 60 million years later' according to Ass. Prof. Hassenkam.

If we can manage to squeeze even a few percent more oil out of the seabed under the North Sea it could be worth millions of Danish crowns (DKK) for Denmark. Therefore Mærsk Oil and Gas AS on behalf of DUC (Dansk Undergrunds Consortium) along with Danish National Advanced Technology Foundation are supporting a project being carried out by Professor Susan Stipps' research group – the so-called Nano-Chalk Venture, which has been ongoing for the last two years. Tue Hassenkam originally became interested in chalk because he found the algae casings so beautiful. Today, after a year's work in front of a microscope, he is glad that his work also has a practical application. An understanding of how the oil clings to the chalk can possibly help develop a method to release it. And that will be the second part of the Nano-Chalk Venture.

High Blood Pressure Could Be Caused By A Common Virus

A new study suggests for the first time that cytomegalovirus (CMV), a common viral infection affecting between 60 and 99 percent of adults worldwide, is a cause of high blood pressure, a leading risk factor for heart disease, stroke and kidney disease.

Led by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and published in the May 15, 2009 issue of PLoS Pathogens, the findings further demonstrate that, when coupled with other risk factors for heart disease, the virus can lead to the development of atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries.

"CMV infects humans all over the world," explains co-senior author Clyde Crumpacker, MD, an investigator in the Division of Infectious Diseases at BIDMC and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. "This new discovery may eventually provide doctors with a whole new approach to treating hypertension, with anti-viral therapies or vaccines becoming part of the prescription."

A member of the herpes virus family, CMV affects all age groups and is the source of congenital infection, mononucleosis, and severe infection in transplant patients. By the age of 40, most adults will have contracted the virus, though many will never exhibit symptoms. Once it has entered the body, CMV is usually there to stay, remaining latent until the immune system is compromised, when it then reemerges.

Previous epidemiological studies had determined that the CMV virus was linked to restenosis in cardiac transplant patients, a situation in which the heart's arteries "reblock." The virus had also been linked to the development of atherosclerosis, the hardening of the heart's arteries. But, in both cases, the mechanism behind these developments remained a mystery. This new study brought together a team of researchers from a variety of disciplines – infectious diseases, cardiology, allergy and pathology – to look more closely at the issue.

"By combining the insights of investigators from different medical disciplines, we were able to measure effects of a viral infection that may have been previously overlooked," explains Crumpacker.

In the first portion of the study, the scientists examined four groups of laboratory mice. Two groups of animals were fed a standard diet and two groups were fed a high cholesterol diet. After a period of four weeks, one standard diet mouse group and one high-cholesterol diet mouse group were infected with the CMV virus.

Six weeks later, the animals' blood pressures were measured by the cardiology team using a small catheter inserted in the mouse carotid artery. Among the mice fed a standard diet, the CMV-infected mice had increased blood pressure compared with the uninfected group. But even more dramatically, 30 percent of the CMV-infected mice that were fed a high-cholesterol diet not only exhibited increased blood pressure, but also showed signs of having developed atherosclerosis.

"This strongly suggests that the CMV infection and the high-cholesterol diet might be working together to cause atherosclerosis," says Crumpacker. In order to find out how and why this was occurring, the investigators went on to conduct a series of cell culture experiments.

Their first analysis demonstrated that CMV stimulated production of three different inflammatory cytokines – IL6, TNF, and MCP1 – in the infected mice, an indication that the virus was causing inflammation to vascular cells and other tissues.
A second analysis found that infection of a mouse kidney cell line with murine CMV led to an increase in expression of the renin enzyme, which has been known to activate the renin-angiotensin system and lead to high blood pressure. Clinical isolates of human CMV in cultured blood vessel cells also produced increased renin expression.

"Viruses have the ability to turn on human genes and, in this case, the CMV virus is enhancing expression of renin, an enzyme directly involved in causing high blood pressure," says Crumpacker. When the scientists inactivated the virus through the use of ultraviolet light, renin expression did not increase, suggesting that actively replicating virus was causing the increase in renin.

In their final experiments, the researchers demonstrated that the protein angiotensin 11 was also increased in response to infection with CMV. "Increased expression of both renin and angiotensin 11 are important factors in hypertension in humans," says Crumpacker. "What our study seems to indicate is that a persistent viral infection in the vessels' endothelial cells is leading to increased expression of inflammatory cytokines, renin and angiotensin 11, which are leading to increased blood pressure."

According to recent figures from the American Heart Association, one in three U.S. adults has high blood pressure, and because there are no known symptoms, nearly one-third of these individuals are unaware of their condition. Often dubbed "the silent killer," uncontrolled high blood pressure can lead to stroke, heart attack, heart failure or kidney failure, notes Crumpacker.

"We found that CMV infection alone led to an increase in high blood pressure, and when combined with a high-cholesterol diet, the infection actually induced atherosclerosis in a mouse aorta," says Crumpacker. "This suggests that further research needs to be directed at viral causes of vascular injury. Some cases of hypertension might be treated or prevented by antiviral therapy or a vaccine against CMV."

This study was funded by grants from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health.