Real food economics
Pamela Mason, Tim Lang in Sustainable Diets, 2017
Making financial calculations of environmental or health costs requires clear analysis but is still partly a philosophical exercise. Costs can be physical and social, material and cultural. How can one calculate the loss of a view of the sky from a window or of prime agricultural land from being covered by a housing estate or factory or the destruction of a species?93 Take the issue of fertiliser use, which has been the main driver of the twentieth-century rise in food production. The value of having a plentiful source of fertilisers had been shown by the nineteenth-century use of vast resources of guano (dried bird manure accrued over thousands of years). Mining guano made the traders rich and showed that spreading extra fertilisers on fields increased land outputs. Newly confident chemical scientists understood that nitrogen was plentiful in the air. The problem was how to ‘fix’ it. This was solved in Germany in 1909–10 where a technical process was developed, first in the laboratory in 1909 by Haber, and then in 1910 at industrial scale by Bosch working for the chemical giant BASF to create the cheap and plentiful Haber-Bosch process. The two Germans received the Nobel Prize for their efforts. But nitrogen-based ‘artificial’ fertilisers are oil-based, i.e., they use previously cheap, compressed energy from decayed plants trapped in the earth’s geological strata. A century after Haber-Bosch, we now know this is a big factor in agriculture’s impact on climate change. What initially was an advance is now an environmental threat.
Urban Health in the US and UK
Igor Vojnovic, Amber L. Pearson, Gershim Asiki, Geoffrey DeVerteuil, Adriana Allen in Handbook of Global Urban Health, 2019
Food production in all parts of the US and UK of course was essential in supporting urban populations, and the labor involved in maintaining agricultural productivity spanned surprisingly expansive parts of the globe. Already by the 1840s, industrial practices had exhausted soil nutrients, threatening to reduce productivity. Advances in soil science determined nitrate to be the key element in reviving the soil, which subsequently drove a search for the best nitrate sources. What followed was 40 years of very entangled networks of labor, resource extraction, war, debt, and imperialism when it was discovered that nitrate-rich Peruvian bird guano would make the best fertilizer. Ships from both countries, and others, began sailing to the small island off the coast of Peru that had centuries’ worth of guano piled multiple feet thick on an otherwise uninhabited rock. For the purposes of this chapter, the facet most relevant to this story is the fact that, between 1849 and 1874, over 90,000 Chinese indentured laborers were shipped to Peru, of whom at least 9,700 died from appalling conditions during the five-month boat trip.
Pearls in Establishing a Clinical Diagnosis: Signs and Symptoms
Johan A. Maertens, Kieren A. Marr in Diagnosis of Fungal Infections, 2007
Many people do things in their leisure time that are not expected, may seem out of character, and remain unknown to the physician unless specifically sought. It is mostly outdoor leisure activities that have been associated with exposure to the endemic fungi. The most straightforward is the association of gardening, especially rose gardening, with sporotrichosis (28). Another less obvious exposure that should be sought when a patient presents with skin lesions in a lympocutaneous distribution is playing in prairie hay (29,30). The leisure activity that is most often associated with the development of histoplasmosis is spelunking (31). Many caves in Central America and east of the Mississippi in the United States have large bat populations and luxurious growth of H. capsulatum in their guano, from which the conidia can be aerosolized when disturbed (32). Hunters and, interestingly, their dogs appear to have an increased risk of developing blastomycosis, presumably because of exposure to both as they rustle through wooded areas (33).
Endemic pulmonary fungal diseases in immunocompetent patients: an emphasis on thoracic imaging
Published in Expert Review of Respiratory Medicine, 2019
Ana Luiza Di Mango, Gláucia Zanetti, Diana Penha, Miriam Menna Barreto, Edson Marchiori
Blastomycosis is an endemic fungal infection caused by the thermally dimorphic fungus, Blastomyces spp. and causes disease mostly in immunocompetent hosts, with a slight predilection for men. Although epidemiological knowledge about this disease is limited, it occurs mainly in North America, predominantly in the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys, as well in Canadian provinces that border the Great Lakes. Blastomyces is found in forested or sandy soils, with decaying vegetation located near water sources. This fungus can also grow in bird guano. Recent analysis suggests that Blastomyces genus may have two different species, B. dermatitidis and B. Gilchristii. Similar to most of the other endemic mycoses, infection occurs most commonly following inhalation of conidia that are aerosolized after soil disruption. Within alveoli, conidia convert into yeast, which is more difficult to kill by host cell immunity. Traumatic inoculation of skin is less common, but also reported. B. dermatitidis can also infects animals, mainly dogs [46–49].
Zoonotic fungal diseases and animal ownership in Nigeria
Published in Alexandria Journal of Medicine, 2018
Adebowale I. Adebiyi, Daniel O. Oluwayelu
Although the incidence of African histoplasmosis is rare, approximately 50% of recorded cases have occurred in Nigeria while 25% of cases have been recorded in Niger, Senegal, Congo, Zaire and Uganda.60 Following an investigation conducted in a bat cave in a rural area of Anambra state, southeast Nigeria, Gugnani et al.52 discovered a natural reservoir of H. capsulatum var. duboisii in soil admixed with bat guano. The fungus was also recovered from the intestinal contents of a hairy-tailed slit face bat with long ears (Nycteris hispida) examined from the cave.61 Additionally, these workers detected a high prevalence (35%) of skin sensitivity to histoplasmin among the cave guides, traders and farmers as well as precipitating antibodies to histoplasmin in the sera of 9.4% of young adults (farmers and palm oil workers) resident in the vicinity of the cave.61 Subsequently, antibodies to histoplasmin have been detected in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected patients and carriers, indicating the existence of co-infections with H. capsulatum var. duboisii and HIV in Nigeria.62
Endemic mycoses: epidemiology and diagnostic strategies
Published in Expert Review of Anti-infective Therapy, 2020
Andrés Tirado-Sánchez, Gloria M. González, Alexandro Bonifaz
As a disease acquired in travelers, the most important destination sites are South and Central America (57%), followed by North America (21%), and mainly associated with cave exploration and contact with bat guano (61%) [32,33]. A study conducted in 2005 included 342 people who had made their first trip to Latin America: 20% of the travelers had a positive histoplasmin intradermal reaction, indicating that one-fifth (20%) of the population could have inhaled Histoplasma conidia [24]. The probability of positive cutaneous response was more significant on trips to Central America (Guatemala) and in long-term stays or when activities were carried out in natural environments. Most of these travelers showed no symptoms or nonspecific of infection (malaise, fever, and cough and often-pulmonary infiltrate); thirteen cases were diagnosed with HPL, and six were treated with itraconazole [34].
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