Doctors without borders’ angst

As refugees, migrants and asylum seekers continue to die in the Mediterranean Sea, international medical humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and its partner SOS Méditerranée have been forced to terminate operations by the search and rescue vessel Aquarius.

Over the past two months, with people continuing to flee by sea along the world’s deadliest migration route, Aquarius has remained in port, unable to carry out its humanitarian work. This is the result of a sustained campaign, spearheaded by the Italian government and backed by other European states, to delegitimise, slander and obstruct aid organisations providing assistance to vulnerable people, MSF said. With no immediate solution to these attacks, MSF and SOS Méditerranée have no choice but to end operations by Aquarius.

“This is a dark day,” says Nelke Manders, MSF’s general director. “Not only has Europe failed to provide search and rescue capacity, it has also actively sabotaged others’ attempts to save lives. The end of Aquarius means more deaths at sea, and more needless deaths that will go unwitnessed.”

The proportion of the global population vulnerable to heat-related death and disease is growing as a result of climate change’s effects on growing populations of older people, people living in cities, and people with non-communicable diseases (NCDs), according to the 2018 report of The Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change . The rising vulnerability to the heat-related risks of climate change is mirrored by increased exposure to higher temperatures. Despite a mean global temperature increase of 0.3°C between 1986 and 2017, the average temperature increase people were exposed to was more than double this (0.8°C), a note from the journal said. With the pace of climate change outweighing the urgency of the response, the report provides cause for concern. However, the authors also note promising trends in key areas for health, including the phase-out of coal, the deployment of healthier, cleaner modes of transport, and health system adaptation.

Genetic test for patient care

 

 

The US Food and Drug Administration has taken a significant step forward in driving the efficient development of novel diagnostic technologies that scan a person’s DNA to diagnose genetic diseases and guide medical treatments. For the first time, the agency has formally recognised a public database that contains information about genes, genetic variants and their relationship to disease. The FDA is recognising the genetic variant information in the Clinical Genome Resource (ClinGen) consortium’s ClinGen Expert Curated Human Genetic Data, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), as a source of valid scientific evidence that can be used to support clinical validity in pre-market submissions. The information contained in this open database has been collected and studied by researchers across the world. This recognition by the FDA will facilitate test developers, including those that use a technology known as next generation sequencing, to rely on the information available in the database to support the validity of their tests, instead of having to generate the information on their own.

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