The current socio-economic, environmental and public health challenges that countries are facing clearly need common-defined strategies to inform and support our transition to a sustainable economy. Here, the technology-critical elements (which includes Ga, Ge, In, Te, Nb, Ta, Tl, the Platinum Group Elements and most of the rare-earth elements) are of great relevance in the development of emerg...

Identifying the relative risk human activities pose to a habitat, and the ecosystem services they provide, can guide management prioritisation and resource allocation. Using a combination of expert elicitation to assess the probable effect of a threat and existing data to assess the level of threat exposure, we conducted a risk assessment for 38 human-mediated threats to eight marine habitats (...

Facial expressions of basic emotions have been widely used to investigate the neural substrates of emotion processing, but little is known about the exact meaning of subjective changes provoked by perceiving facial expressions. Our assumption was that fearful faces would be related to the processing of potential threats, whereas angry faces would be related to the processing of proximal threats...

BACKGROUND Chronic diseases are increasing among children in Latin America. OBJECTIVE AND METHODS To examine environmental risk factors for chronic disease in Latin American children and to develop a strategic initiative for control of these exposures, the World Health Organization (WHO) including the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the Collegium Ramazzini, and Latin American scienti...

Patterns of Potential Human Progress Volume 3: Improving Global Health 90 People have recognized the relationship between the state of the environment and human health for many years. Dr. John Snow, considered the father of modern epidemiology, is best remembered for linking the 1854 London cholera outbreak to the local drinking water supply (McMichael 2001). The smog episodes in Donora, Pennsy...

Children are required by law to attend school in the United States; many parents voluntarily send their children to preschool or child care centers. Environmental health threats in child care centers and in prekindergarten to 12th grade (PK–12) schools compromise children’s health and learning; yet there is no federal, state, or local agency that is authorized, funded, and staffed to protect ch...

Plasmid-mediated carbapenem-hydrolyzing β-lactamases are becoming emerging threats with Enterobacteriaceae. In particular, the carbapenem-hydrolyzing class D β-lactamase OXA-48 and its derivative OXA-181 have been reported increasingly worldwide. Using a PCR-based strategy, environmental samples were screened for bla(OXA-48)-like genes. Shewanella xiamenensis, an environmental species from mari...

Antimicrobial resistance and emerging infectious diseases, including avian influenza, Ebola virus disease, and Zika virus disease have significantly affected humankind in recent years. In the premodern era, no distinction was made between animal and human medicine. However, as medical science developed, the gap between human and animal science grew deeper. Cooperation among human, animal, and e...

The global movement of people and goods has increased the risk of biosecurity threats and their potential to incur large economic, social, and environmental costs. Conventional manual biosecurity surveillance methods are limited by their scalability in space and time. This article focuses on autonomous surveillance systems, comprising sensor networks, robots, and intelligent algorithms, and the...

We examined how different drivers of infectious disease could interact to threaten control efforts in Europe. We considered projected trends through 2020 for 3 broad groups of drivers: globalization and environmental change, social and demographic change, and health system capacity. Eight plausible infectious disease threats with the potential to be significantly more problematic than they are ...