Sick building syndrome and multichemical sensitivity may not hit the headlines as often as they used to, but they do continue to represent an important health and safety issue for those who manage work place environments.
Now, researchers in Sweden have carried out a detailed analysis of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), such as aldehydes, amines, and acids, that are found in the air of various buildings. They compared their results for buildings in which people with non-specific building-related symptoms (also called sick building syndrome, SBS) perceive health problems and for buildings where they do not.
More on this in my latest news featured in SpectroscopyNOW.com.
Aside from write-ups in the New York Times and the journal Nature, there has been very little in the media recently concerning the plight of five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor who face death sentences in Libya. The six are charged with deliberately infecting hundreds of children with HIV, the AIDS virus, in 1998. The charges are nothing more than “preposterous” says the NYT, given that infections appeared before these medics began work at the hospital in question! The NYT suggests that this “looming miscarriage of justice demands a strong warning to the Libyan leader, Muammar el-Qaddafi, that his efforts to join the ranks of peaceable nations will suffer if the medical workers are made the scapegoats for the failure of Libya’s own health system.” The evidence points to wholly inadequate hygiene as being to blame rather than the accused individuals.
The six medics were arrested in 1999. Confessions were wrought from each of them under torture according to human rights organisations, but the individuals later retracted their statements. It seems to be beyond doubt that the six are not guilty yet they have been under a death sentence since 2004. Nature suggests that the silence of scientists over this case is due to a hope that diplomacy might resolve the issue. After all, the NYT reports, the White House currently has Libya on a pedestal as an ideal state that no longer abides weapons of mass destruction.
The day the UK’s medicines approval agency NICE, announces that certain Alzheimer’s drugs are to be limited to those in the latter stages of the disease to get the best value for money, I read a Nature press release announcing a novel approach to treating the disease based on supercharging an enzyme that looks like the video game character Pac-man. US researchers have determined the crystal structure of a protein-degrading enzyme as it binds to its natural protein substrates.
We’re beta testing a new way for Sciencebase readers to grab the science headlines. You can now access Sciencebase science news headlines on your WAP phone and similar devices, no need to tell us your phone number or anything, just follow this science wap link.
Almost £2 billion (about $3.7 billion) is needed to refurb school chemistry laboratories and help ensure British science remains viable, according to the Royal Society of Chemistry. If the money is not ring-fenced vital plans to upgrade the labs will fall a quarter of a century behind government targets.
Richard Dawkins told us in the 1970s that all organisms are nothing more than gene machines, robot zombies built by molecules we loosely know as genes to no end other than to ensure the replication of those very molecules. There is no purpose here, although Dawkins anthropomorphically endowed the genes with selfishness. Later, he extrapolated this concept of self-replicating entities to concepts, patterns of thought, that exist only in the organism we know as Homo sapiens and that are duplicated not by sex and reproduction but through communication via the systems we call culture. These self-replicating entities he referred to as memes.