Subscribe to My Feed
Loading ...Toward a Cosmetovigilance System for Latin America?
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008A key focus of the recent Tenth Meeting of Sanitary Authorities of the Americas in the Cosmetics, Personal Hygiene and Perfume Sector (Reunión de Autoridades Sanitarias de las Américas del Sector de Higiene Personal, Perfumería y Cosméticos – RASA) in São Paulo and the need for cosmetovigilance in the region. What is RASA and what […]
A Dengue Vaccine by December?
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008During the 60th Annual Meeting of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (Sociedade Brasileira para o Progresso da Ciência– SBPC) last month held in Campinas, São Paulo, it was announced that Brazil probably will go to market first with a vaccine against dengue and that they may start producing it as early as […]
Dengue on the Rise Again / Dengue Avance de Nuevo
Friday, October 12th, 2007If you’ve ever had dengue before, you can testify to its agony. My wife got it from a mosquito while we lived in Santo Domingo in the late 1990s, and for a week she experienced fiery pain in every joint and muscle, a steady headache and fever that will not respond to any medicines. She […]
Malaria in the Americas: Still Formidible / Malaria en las Américas: formidable todavia
Wednesday, October 10th, 2007The short status report to PAHO's governing body, the Pan American Sanitary Conference, mentioned in the releases reproduced below, is available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. As the report shows, fighting malaria in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) remains a formidable challenge. While there has been a decrease in reported cases overall for LAC, […]
Tapping Methane in Dam Reservoirs to Generate Electricity
Friday, August 10th, 2007Researchers at Brazil’s National Space Research Institute (Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espacias – INPE) based in São José dos Campos, São Paulo (SP), have created a system to capture the accumulated methane in the reservoirs of hydroelectric plants and utilize it to generate more electrical power. The system would not only cut greenhouse gas emissions […]
Impact of Sea Level Rise on LAC
Monday, May 14th, 2007While the reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have stolen the headlines and thunder, the World Bank quietly released an important working paper examining how the expected rise in sea level (SLR) caused by global climate change might affect the 84 coastal developing countries among its membership. Twenty-five of these are […]
Combatting Deforestation I: How Bad Is It in LAC?
Wednesday, March 14th, 2007In my “confession and foreword” to the series on deforestation in LAC, I promised to begin with a look at the current state of knowledge about the rate and magnitude of deforestation in in the region. Here is my stab at this topic, building on an entry I originally sketched out last November regarding the […]
Bush Asks Senate to Ratify Caribbean Pact on Marine Pollution
Tuesday, March 13th, 2007Been meaning to get this out for nearly three weeks! This is actually rare good international environment news from the Bush White House. Implementation of the 1983 Cartagena Convention's 1999 Protocol on Pollution from Land-based Sources and Activities (LBS) has been hampered by US hesitation to ratify the Protocol. The LBS, in fact, has not […]
The World’s Largest Rainforest Park
Friday, March 9th, 2007The North Amazon Mosiac of Protected Areas – Map by WWF Synopsis in English: On 28 February a French decree effectively created the world’s largest rainforest protected area in the northern Amazon. The decree created a 2-million hectare Parc Amazonien de Guyane (“Guyana Amazonian Park”) along the southern border of French Guiana, France’s “overseas department” […]
Is Meeting the MDGs for Water & Sanitation Good Enough?
Wednesday, September 27th, 2006This month the World Health Organization (WHO) released a progress report on meeting the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as they apply to access to “improved” water and sanitation, using data collected by the WHO/UNICEF joint Monitoring Programme (JMP). As the WHO report I recently reviewed on the linkage between environmental conditions and health […]