Cross-disciplinarity in the advance of Antarctic ecosystem research.

The biodiversity, ecosystem services and climate variability of the Antarctic continent and the Southern Ocean are major components of the whole Earth system. Antarctic ecosystems are driven more strongly by the physical environment than many other marine and terrestrial ecosystems. As a consequence, to understand ecological functioning, cross-disciplinary studies are especially important in Antarctic research. The conceptual study presented here is based on a workshop initiated by the Research Programme Antarctic Thresholds - Ecosystem Resilience and Adaptation of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, which focussed on challenges in identifying and applying cross-disciplinary approaches in the Antarctic. Novel ideas and first steps in their implementation were clustered into eight themes. These ranged from scale problems, through risk maps, and organism/ecosystem responses to multiple environmental changes and evolutionary processes. Scaling models and data across different spatial and temporal scales were identified as an overarching challenge. Approaches to bridge gaps in Antarctic research programmes included multi-disciplinary monitoring, linking biomolecular findings and simulated physical environments, as well as integrative ecological modelling. The results of advanced cross-disciplinary approaches can contribute significantly to our knowledge of Antarctic and global ecosystem functioning, the consequences of climate change, and to global assessments that ultimately benefit humankind.

Global Forum on Safety of Herbal and Traditional Medicine: July 7, 2001, Gold Coast, Australia.

This report provides a summary of the background and inputs of various groups who attended the Global Forum on Safety of Herbal and Traditional Medicine conference held in the Gold Coast, Australia, on July 7, 2001. Keynote presentations covered the status of regulation of complementary medicine in Australia and comparative examples from Africa and Bangladesh. There was substantial input about work to date on databases, reflecting the need to have a focus on safety outcomes as a point of direction for the forum. Safety evaluation, which incorporates quality procedures, was identified as another point of focus. Clear evidence for the nonutilization of plants known to contain certain compounds producing deleterious effects was exemplified via data and information on the dangers of ingesting pyrrolizidine alkaloids.

The first international meeting of the Research Initiative on Traditional Antimalarial Methods (RITAM).

The first international meeting of the Research Initiative on Traditional Antimalarial Methods (RITAM) was held at the Regional Dermatology Training Centre (RDTC) of the Tumaini University of Health Sciences, Moshi, Tanzania, on December 8-11, 1999. This Inaugural Meeting of RITAM, jointly hosted by the Global Initiative for Traditional Systems of Health (GIFTS) at Oxford University and the World Health Organization (WHO), was designed to develop a strategy for more effective, evidence-based use of traditional medicines that can also inform malaria-control policy decisions. RITAM was established during 1999 as a network of researchers and other people who are active or interested in the study and use of traditional, plant-based antimalarials. RITAM is a partnership between GIFTS of Health, University of Oxford and the Tropical Disease Research (TDR) Programme of WHO. Malaria is one of the key health issues affecting developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. With increasing drug resistance and the high cost of pharmaceutical drugs, the use of herbal antimalarials is popular. The conference was attended by biologic and social scientists, clinicians, traditional healers, and policy makers from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. The meeting was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Nuffield Foundation's Commonwealth Programme, WHO's TDR Programme, and direct support to delegates was provided by other funders. The meeting addressed the need for research and policy on the prophylactic and therapeutic effects of medicinal plants as well as on vector control and repellence. There were five main outputs from the meeting: (1) targets for making a significant contribution to the control of malaria through the use of traditional antimalarial methods; (2) methods for achieving these targets, including ethical guidelines; (3) an implementation strategy for moving this field ahead quickly and soundly and for putting research findings into practice; (4) linkages established between researchers working on traditional antimalarial methods, based on agreed research priorities and designed to avoid unnecessary replication; and (5) strengthening the RITAM database of current knowledge on traditional herbal antimalarial methods. Four specialist groups were established to develop the above: (1) policy, advocacy, and funding; (2) preclinical studies; (3) clinical development; and (4) repellance and vector control. These will be coordinated by an executive committee managed by GIFTS. Two meetings are planned in 2000: a natural-products chemistry meeting at WHO in Geneva, Switzerland, in June; and a symposium at the World Congress on Tropical Medicine in Cartagena, Colombia, in August.

Increased summertime UV radiation in New Zealand in response to ozone loss.

Long-term decreases in summertime ozone over Lauder, New Zealand (45 degrees S), are shown to have led to substantial increases in peak ultraviolet (UV) radiation intensities. In the summer of 1998-99, the peak sunburning UV radiation was about 12 percent more than in the first years of the decade. Larger increases were seen for DNA-damaging UV radiation and plant-damaging UV radiation, whereas UV-A (315 to 400 nanometers) radiation, which is insensitive to ozone, showed no increase, in agreement with model calculations. These results provide strong evidence of human-induced increases in UV radiation, in a region where baseline levels of UV radiation were already relatively high.