Capturing the value of biosurveillance“big data”through natural capital accounting

Global biodiversity is in crises.Recognition of the scale and pace of biodiversity loss is leading to rapid technological development in biodiversity science to identify species,their interactions,and eco-system dynamics.National and international policy developments to stimulate mitigation and remediation actions are escalating to meet the biodiversity crises.They can take advantage of biosurveil-lance“big data”as evidence for more sweeping and impactful policy measures.The critical factor is translating biosurveillance data into the value-based frameworks underpinning new policy measures.An approach to this integration process,using natural capital accounting frameworks is developed.

Emerging and re-emerging viruses: A global challenge illustrated by Chikungunya virus outbreaks

In recent decades, the issue of emerging and reemerging infectious diseases, especially those related to viruses, has become an increasingly important area of concern in public health. It is of significance to anticipate future epidemics by accumulating knowledge through appropriate research and by monitoring their emergence using indicators from different sources. The objective is to alert and respond effectively in order to reduce the adverse impact on the general populations. Most of the emerging pathogens in humans originate from known zoonosis. These pathogens have been engaged in long-standing and highly successful interactions with their hosts since their origins are exquisitely adapted to host parasitism. They developed strategies aimed at:(1) maximizing invasion rate;(2) selecting host traits that can reduce their impact on host life span and fertility;(3) ensuring timely replication and survival both within host and between hosts; and(4) facilitating reliable transmission to progeny. In this context, Arboviruses(or ARthropod-BOrne viruses), will represent with certainty a threat for the coming century. The unprecedented epidemic of Chikungunya virus which occurred between 2005 and 2006 in the FrenchReunion Island in the Indian Ocean, followed by several outbreaks in other parts of the world, such as India and Southern Europe, has attracted the attention of medical and state authorities about the risks linked to this re-emerging mosquito-borne virus. This is an excellent model to illustrate the issues we are facing today and to improve how to respond tomorrow.

Point-of-need molecular processing of biosamples using portable instrumentation to reduce turnaround time

Infectious agents,both standard and emerging or engineered,might initiate outbreaks with global impact and/or existential-level threat potential.Such agents might infect human,livestock,exploitable plant cultures or the environment at large.Instead of responding by sampling teams which may also carry out prolonged surveillance,a more effective concept is to pre-process the samples,possibly to nucleic acid extract so as to transport them without biological risks by standard channels,or to process them up to a point and return the results,leaving the samples which only need specialized tests and dedicated equipment.In this context a portable device,allowing multiple routine and crisis-management applications due to its inherent flexibility,is scrutinized against alternatives and possible needs so as to develop a novel standard of surveillance and intervention,meant to facilitate containment by providing faster much more reliable laboratory results at a fraction of older generation mobile nucleic acids analyzers.Additional steps,such as agarose in pills and buffers pre-packaged in expendable syringes with pistons locked by improvised safety features may improve the Complexity Level of the whole system so as to make it appealing to intervention/crisis management personnel,while the instrument proper may double as backup for respective benchtop devices.