An alcohol substitute that mimics its pleasant buzz without leading to drunkenness is being developed by scientists.

The new substance could have the added bonus of being “switched off” instantaneously with a pill, to allow drinkers to drive home or return to work.

The synthetic alcohol, being developed from chemicals related to Valium, works like alcohol on nerves in the brain that provide a feeling of wellbeing and relaxation.

But unlike alcohol its does not affect other parts of the brain that control mood swings and lead to addiction. It is also much easier to flush out of the body.

Finally because it is much more focused in its effects, it can also be switched off with an antidote, leaving the drinker immediately sober.

The new alcohol is being developed by a team at Imperial College London, led by Professor David Nutt, Britain’s top drugs expert who was recently sacked as a government adviser for his comments about cannabis and ecstasy.

He envisions a world in which people could drink without getting drunk, he said.

No matter how many glasses they had, they would remain in that pleasant state of mild inebriation and at the end of an evening out, revellers could pop a sober-up pill that would let them drive home.

Prof Nutt and his team are concentrating their efforts on benzodiazepines, of which diazepam, the chief ingredient of Valium is one.

Thousands of candidate benzos are already known to science. He said it is just a matter of identifying the closest match and then, if necessary, tailoring it to fit society’s needs.

Ideally, like alcohol, it should be tasteless and colourless, leaving those characteristics to the drink it’s in.

Eventually it would be used to replace the alcohol content in beer, wine and spirits and the recovered ethanol (the chemical name for alcohol) could be sold as fuel.

Professor Nutt believes that the new drug, which would need licensing, could have a dramatic effect on society and improve the nation’s health.

The NHS report Statistics on Alcohol: England, 2009 found more than 800,000 alcohol-related admissions to hospitals in 2007-08 – and more than 6,500 deaths – at a cost to the service of £2.7bn a year.

Some charities estimate that the toll could be up to five times higher. Drink is, for example, a factor in 40 per cent of fatal fires, 15 per cent of drownings, 65 per cent of suicides and 40 per cent of domestic abuse. It also has other costs, including 17 million lost working days a year, worth about £20bn to the economy.

“I’ve been in experiments where I’ve taken benzos,” said Professor Nutt. “One minute I was sedated and nearly asleep, five minutes later I was giving a lecture.

“No one’s ever tried targeting this before, possibly because it will be so hard to get it past the regulators.

“Most of the benzos are controlled under the Medicines Act. The law gives a privileged position to alcohol, which has been around for 3,000 years. But why not use advances in pharmacology to find something safer and better?”

Getting the drug approved could be hard for the team as clinical trials are expensive, and it is not clear who would pay for them, according to Professor Nutt.

He said that the traditional drinks industry has not shown any interest, however some countries might be persuaded to sponsor the team.

Some countries have more liberal regimes than others, though, and Professor Nutt thinks Greece or Spain, within the EU, could lead the way.

The latest Home Office performance figures showed that more than one in four people believe that alcohol is blighting their community.

A survey of every police force area in England and Wales found that 26 per cent of those polled “perceived people being drunk or rowdy in public placed to be a problem in their area” – a slight increase from last year.

The fears over the affects of alcohol range from urban to rural communities, with the worst hit being Manchester, South Wales, London, Northumbria and Gwent.

One of the super-cooled tubes that make up the Large Hadron Collider

Sunday, 18 July 2010

After decades of bending atoms around giant rings and smashing them apart in search of the secrets of the universe, scientists at Cern, the European particle physics laboratory outside Geneva, are reviving a 1960s technology and going straight.

Their latest ring, the 27km Large Hadron Collider (LHC), only got up to speed in March, yet physicists meet in Paris this week to discuss plans for a new $6.7bn (£4.4bn) experiment – the International Linear Collider (ILC), which they hope to start building in 2012.

The new machine will be a straight-line tunnel, 31km long, and will use super-conducting magnets to accelerate electrons and positrons, their antimatter equivalents, towards each other at close to the speed of light.

“To explore what the LHC discovers in more detail, you need an electron collider,” says Professor Brian Foster, the European director of the ILC project. Part of the report to the Paris conference will be “a blueprint for how you would set up an ILC lab”. More than 700 people at 300 laboratories and universities around the world are already working on the accelerator. The only other high-energy linear electron smasher is the Stanford Linear Accelerator in California, a 3.2km track built in 1962.

Both the existing LHC and the planned ILC are trying to solve fundamental physics questions, including – what happened in the Big Bang? Where did all the antimatter go? How many dimensions does space have? Why are there so many different sub-atomic particles? And, most famously, what does a Higgs particle look like?

While the 12 subatomic components of matter have all been found, including quarks and neutrinos, the Higgs has proved more elusive. The leading theory of how the universe works says that the Higgs gives matter mass, and therefore gravity. Its discovery could point the way to unifying the two great 20th-century theories of physics – quantum and general relativity.

It may also help solve the mystery of the missing 96 per cent of the universe. When astronomers estimate the mass of galaxies, including stars, planets, nebulas and black holes, they find that they are so light they should fly apart as they spin. The extra mass needed to keep them together is thought to be hidden in as yet undiscovered “dark matter”.

Although a location for the new device has not been decided, Cern is a likely contender, if only because most of the physicists who might want to use it are already there, along with the infrastructure they need.

Cern’s LHC uses protons made from atoms of the lightest element, hydrogen, by stripping off their electrons in a strong magnetic field, and accelerating them to 99.9999991 per cent of the speed of light.

By the time they enter the LHC, Einstein’s equation, E=mc2, is in play. Since the protons can’t be made to go any faster, pumping additional energy in makes them more massive. In the LHC, they can be pushed to 7 trillion electron volts. When two beams, rotating in opposite directions, cross, the energy released from a single pair could be as high as 14 TeV.

But proton crashes are “dirty”. “It’s like colliding two oranges together at 45mph,” says Professor Foster. “Sometimes the pips hit each other, but usually it’s just a spray of juice.” The pips, in his analogy, are the trio of quarks that make up a proton and which cause the most interesting smashes. Typically, only one quark from each proton in a collision will hit head on, while the other four will miss each other.

Worse, although scientists know how much energy they’ve put into each proton, they don’t know how it is distributed between the pips. One quark could have most of it, or all three could have roughly equal amounts. At best, researchers can tell the maximum amount of energy a collision might involve. Still, the LHC produces billions of bangs a second so they know roughly what energy levels give them interesting results.

But for a more precise exploration of the high-energy frontier, they will need the ILC. Electrons are 2,000 times smaller than protons, and do not have an internal structure. When two of them run into each other, the energy released is known exactly.

But electrons are not perfect. When particles are bent by magnetic fields, they emit X-rays. For relatively massive protons, this is not a problem, but for the lighter electrons it’s a huge obstacle. Most of the energy pumped into an electron in the LHC would merely replace that lost to radiation.

And so, scientists are returning to the linear design of half a century ago. The exact specifications will have to wait until the LHC has identified which energy ranges are of interest, but the ILC as envisioned will have energy levels of around 0.5TeV.

Construction of the new accelerator is expected to take seven years. No one would be surprised if, during that time, plans emerge for an even more powerful, next-generation accelerator.

Sunday, 11 October 2009

The only road to St Theresa Point in north-eastern Manitoba is made of ice and lasts just two months. The remote community’s 3,200 people, most of them Cree Indians, are squeezed into 530 homes, more than half of them without running water. Until June, a doctor flew in once a week for three days. But since an outbreak of swine flu left more than 200 people ill and sent 12 by air ambulance to Winnipeg, 600km (375 miles) away, Health Canada has been ferrying in more doctors. This autumn, in preparation for the flu season, it is also delivering something else: a supply of body bags.

In Australia, a similar scenario played out in July. An estimated 400 people out of a population of 3,400, more than 90 per cent of them Aboriginal, caught H1N1 influenza on Palm Island off the Queensland coast. In Brazil, a conference on indigenous education was cancelled in September after seven members of the Matsigenka, a tribe living along the Urubamba river in the Peruvian Amazon, tested positive for swine flu.

As health authorities gear up for the northern hemisphere’s flu season, the new strain of influenza is expected to hit indigenous peoples far harder than it will healthy, wealthy, urban Westerners. If the outbreaks in Canada and Australia are any guide, native communities could find a tenth of their populations sick, and untold numbers dead.

The World Health Organisation warned in its August briefing note on the pandemic that minorities and indigenous peoples face a far higher risk of hospitalisation and death. “In some studies, the risk in these groups is four to five times higher than in the general population,” it said.

Survival International, a London-based charity that tries to protect indigenous peoples, has called on the government of the Andaman Islands to close the Andaman Trunk Road because it runs through land populated by a nomadic tribe. The Jarawa came into contact with outsiders only in 1998; within a year, half of them had suffered respiratory problems after an outbreak of measles.

Glenn Shepard, an anthropologist who works closely with Peru’s Matsigenka, said they are not the only tribe he is concerned about. “The arrival of swine flu among the Matsigenka is especially worrying as they are known to have intermittent contact with quite isolated Indian groups living near by,” he said.

Scientists and medical researchers have two hypotheses to explain the vulnerability of tribal peoples. The first is that those, like the Jarawa, who have had little contact with the global community simply have immune systems that have never been primed. Kevin Paterson, a Canadian doctor, notes that during the 1918 Spanish flu, 8.5 per cent of American Indians died, but among the more isolated Inuit in Nome, Alaska, the toll was 55 per cent. In Hebron, Labrador, 5,000km to the east, 150 out of 220 Innu were killed. Yet the global fatality rate for Spanish flu was just 2.5 per cent.

The other hypothesis applies to those indigenous populations that live on the fringes of Western society, such as the Cree of St Theresa Point and the Aborigines on Palm Island. For them, the problem is poverty, poor general health and crowded living conditions. “We have in excess of 15 people living in a three-bedroom home, which you wouldn’t find in mainstream communities,” said Alf Lacey, the mayor of Palm Island. Although Tamiflu was available, many islanders were unaware of it because they are unable to read.

“Influenza has a cure,” said Dr Paterson. “It’s called affluence.”

By Paul Rodgers and Smitha Mundasad

Sunday, 16 May 2010

The spectre of plague stalked the world last year with its constant companion, fear. Schools and stadiums were closed in Mexico, tourists from Egypt to Singapore were quarantined, and the surgical mask became a universal fashion accessory across Asia. Yet predictions that the global death toll from swine flu could reach 7.5 million were well off the mark. At most, the virus killed 14,000 people, and some of those had pre-existing conditions or had been infected by other dangerous bugs as well. Against a background death toll from seasonal flu of up to 500,000, the new H1N1 strain was invisible.

Professor Ulrich Keil, a World Health Organisation (WHO) adviser on heart disease, said the decision to declare a pandemic had led to a “gigantic misallocation” of health budgets. “We know the great killers are hypertension, smoking, high cholesterol, high body mass index, physical inactivity and low fruit and vegetable intake,” he told the Council of Europe. Yet governments “instead wasted huge amounts of money by investing in pandemic scenarios whose evidence base is weak”.

The suspicion that the response to the outbreak was an unnecessary panic has been spreading since the virus slipped from the front pages. Even the WHO, the UN body that first punched the big red button, may be having doubts. An external committee has been set up to review its reaction and will deliver an interim report this week, though at the moment no bombshells are expected.

The WHO faces two main charges. The first is that between the first cases of H1N1 being reported in March and the declaration of a full, phase 6 pandemic by its director-general, Dr Margaret Chan, in June, the organisation changed its definition of a pandemic. Critics say the old definition required that a virus result in “enormous numbers of deaths and illness”. The new definition applies only if the virus is new, if it spreads easily between people, and if the population has little or no immunity to it. A bug that causes a mild case of the sniffles could qualify.

A spokesman for the organisation insists there has been no change at all – that the old definition was an error on a single web page about bird flu, the last great influenza scare. But Peter Doshi, a doctoral candidate at MIT whose thesis is on science, politics and influenza policy, argued in a paper in the British Medical Journal in September that the old definition had been widely applied by the WHO since at least 2003.

The second charge, prominently made by Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, the former head of health at the Council of Europe, is that the WHO is unduly influenced by the drugs industry, which stood to make a fortune from selling anti-virals and vaccines. The Swiss giant Novartis, for example, saw its profits jump by nearly a third in the first quarter of this year to $2.95bn, much of it from delivering swine flu vaccines ordered last year. Debate rages over allegations that some experts who recommended the pandemic be declared, have links to drugs companies, although this has been denied. But critics note that it’s hard to become an expert in the field without having some funding from big pharmaceutical companies.

Others say that the problem is due to the spread of false assumptions. Most people think, for example, that when they have flu symptoms they must have influenza. But Dr Tom Jefferson of the Cochrane Collaboration, which reviews the evidence for various medical treatments, notes that more than 200 agents can cause flu-like illnesses. Only 7.5 to 15 per cent of cases are actually influenza. Anti-viral drugs and vaccines are aimed just at this group. “To stop one new case of H1N1, you’d have to inoculate 100 people,” says Dr Jefferson “or you could get four people to wash their hands.” Masks work too, he says, and so does sending people home from work if they have symptoms.

The usual justification for the massive response to H1N1 is that no one wants a repeat of the 1918 pandemic, which killed an estimated 50 million people. But scientists are not even sure if that plague was caused by influenza at all. The virus was not discovered until 1933. And outbreaks since then have been much milder.

The last time H1N1 showed up was in 1976, at a US army base. Washington ordered the immunisation of 40 million Americans before it discovered that it had only one death from the flu but hundreds of cases of severe side-effects to the vaccine. A review headed by Dr Harvey Fineberg put much of the blame on the “influenza fraternity”, arguing that expert panels tend towards “group think” and should be backed up by independent scientific advice. Dr Fineberg is now chairman of the WHO’s external committee evaluating its response to the 2009 outbreak whose final report next May could well lead to a radical rethink of the world’s reaction to new viruses.

Sunday, 22 August 2010

BHP Billiton, the $200bn mining company, will tomorrow find itself in the middle of a massive geopolitical independence row due to its hostile takeover of Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan.

Marius Kloppers, the chief executive of FTSE 100 stalwart BHP, is taking a $39bn offer for Canadian fertilizer giant PotashCorp directly to shareholders after its board dismissed the amount as “grossly inadequate”.

However, the deal is set to get even uglier due to PotashCorp’s relationship with Office Chérifien des Phosphates (OCP), Morocco’s state phosphates company. OCP is estimated to supply around 500,000 tonnes of phosphates to PotashCorp.

The Sahrawi people have long fought for the independence of the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara and have accused PotashCorp of propping up an “illegal regime” by importing so much phosphate. Three vessels filled with phosphates are understood to have sailed to PotashCorp facilities so far this year.

In a letter to William Doyle, the PotashCorp president and chief executive, dated 1 October 2008, Western Sahara Resource Watch (WSRW), an activist group, said: “We urge you to demonstrate your attachment to international legality, human rights and basic standards of corporate social responsibility by reconsidering your involvement in shipping phosphate of Western Sahara origin.”

WSRW’s international co-ordinator, Sara Eyckmans, said that the group will write to BHP’s management and shareholders tomorrow. “Given the urgency of the situation, we need to get our case in on Monday,” Ms Eyckmans said. “If BHP does take over the company, we do not see how it could help its corporate responsibility profile [unless it stopped trading in Western Sahara]. We will tell management about our concerns. To the shareholders, we will highlight that we are in close dialogue with ethical investors around the world.”

Ms Eyckmans added that the group had raised its concerns to PotashCorp several times in recent years but had not received a response. A spokesman for the company said that it had replied on each occasion.

WSRW’s claim of influence with ethical investors has some weight; €32.5bn Norwegian life insurer and investor Kommunal Landspensjonskasse blacklisted PotashCorp for purchasing phosphate from Western Sahara.

BHP’s offer for the potash and phosphate group is one of three big deals last week that electrified the City, which has been starved of major acquisitions since the credit crunch began to bite. FTSE 100 group Cairn Energy agreed to sell a 51 per cent stake in its Indian operations to miner Vedanta and Korea National Oil went hostile with a £1.9bn bid for Dana Petroleum.

Remarkably, despite the enormity of BHP’s offer, the group’s huge market value means that it does not cross the percentage threshold that would force the mining colossus to get the deal approved by shareholders.

However, Mr Kloppers is expected to outline the rationale of the takeover to analysts following BHP’s full-year results on Wednesday. Cairn and Dana release first-half figures on Tuesday and Friday respectively.

Sunday, 26 September 2010

Australia’s Darling river is running with water again after a drought in the middle of the decade reduced it to a trickle. But the rains feeding the continent’s fourth-longest river are not the undiluted good news you might expect. For the cloudbursts also create ideal conditions for an unwelcome pest – the Australian plague locust.

The warm, wet weather that prevailed last summer meant that three generations of locusts were born, each one up to 150 times larger than the previous generation. After over-wintering beneath the ground, the first generation of 2010 is already hatching. And following the wettest August in seven years, the climate is again perfect. The juveniles will spend 20 to 25 days eating and growing, shedding their exoskeletons five times before emerging as adults, when population pressure will force them to swarm.

It is impossible to say how many billions of bugs will take wing, but many experts fear this year’s infestation could be the worst since records began – 75 years ago. All that one locust expert, Greg Sword, an associate professor at the University of Sydney, would say was: “South Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria are all going to get hammered.”

A one-kilometre wide swarm of locusts can chomp through 10 tons of crops – a third of their combined body weight – in a day. The New South Wales Farmers Association said an area the size of Spain was affected and the Government of Victoria alone forecasts A$2bn (£1.2bn) of damage.

Though locusts move slowly when the sun’s up, at night they can fly high and fast, sometimes travelling hundreds of kilometres. “A farmer can go to bed at night not having seen a grasshopper all year and wake up in the morning to find his fields full of them,” said Professor Sword.

All locusts are grasshoppers, but not all grasshoppers are locusts. The difference is a suite of genetic changes that kick in when population densities cross a critical threshold. In some species, they produce physical transformations – the desert locust of North Africa goes from green to black and yellow, for example – but the Australian plague locust merely reprogrammes its behaviour, from solitary to gregarious.

Swarms probably make use of the available food more efficiently as the leading edge is constantly pushing forwards into new vegetation. It may be fear more than hunger, however, that drives the locusts.

Locusts are highly cannibalistic, says Professor Sword, and any that stay still too long are likely to get nibbled. “Swarms are like lifeboats,” he says, forging a gruesome metaphor. “If you’re the only one in the boat, you could easily starve. But if you’ve got lots of company, you could be the last to survive. We call it travelling with your lunch.”

Controlling the bugs involves spotter planes identifying juvenile bands that can be targets for attack by crop sprayers armed with pesticides. But eastern Australia is struggling to find enough pilots to take on all the work.

And the spraying itself comes at a cost. Apiarists have complained that their bees are in danger from pesticides and ecologists fear for the many animals that treat the locusts as a moving smorgasbord. Concerns have also been raised by bloggers and activists that some of the chemicals used could harm humans.

The best hope for phasing out the chemicals comes from research. But the goal, says Professor Sword, is control not eradication. “They were here long before humans arrived,” he said.

A Maori legend about a giant, man-eating bird has been confirmed by scientists. Te Hokioi was a huge black-and-white predator with a red crest and yellow-green tinged wingtips, in an account given to Sir George Gray, an early governor of New Zealand. It was said to be named after its cry and to have “raced the hawk to the heavens”. Scientists now think the stories handed down by word of mouth and depicted in rock drawings refer to Haast’s eagle, a raptor that became extinct just 500 years ago, say the authors of a study in The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Haast’s eagle (Harpagornis moorei) was discovered in swamp deposits by Sir Julius von Haast in the 1870s. But it was at first thought to be a scavenger because its bill was similar to a vulture’s with hoods over its nostrils to stop flesh blocking its air passages as it rooted around inside carcasses.

But a re-examination of skeletons using modern technology, including CAT scans, by researchers at Canterbury Museum in Christchurch and the University of New South Wales in Australia showed it had a strong enough pelvis to support a killing blow as it dived at speeds of up to 80kph.

With a wingspan of up to three metres and weighing 18kg, the female was twice as big as the largest living eagle, the Steller’s sea eagle. And the bird’s talons were as big as a tiger’s claws. “It was certainly capable of swooping down and taking a child,” said Paul Scofield, the curator of vertebrate zoology at the Canterbury Museum. “They had the ability to not only strike with their talons but to close the talons and put them through quite solid objects such as a pelvis. It was designed as a killing machine.”

Its main prey would have been moa, flightless birds which grew to as much as 250kg and 2.5 metres tall. “In some fossil sites, moa bones have been found with signs of eagle predation,” Dr Scofield said.

New Zealand has no native land mammals because it became isolated from other land masses in the Cretaceous, more than 65 million years ago. As a result, birds filled niches usually populated by large mammals such as deer and cattle. “Haast’s eagle wasn’t just the equivalent of a giant predatory bird,” said Dr Scofield. “It was the equivalent of a lion.” The eagle is thought to have died out after the arrival, 1,000 years ago, of humans, who exterminated the giant moa. The latest study shows it was a recent immigrant to the islands, related to the little eagle (Aquila morphnoides) an Australian bird weighing less than 1kg.

Remains of Haast’s eagles are rare because there never were many. They lived only on New Zealand’s South Island, with probably not more than 1,000 breeding pairs at any one time.

The spectre of famine has returned to the Horn of Africa nearly a quarter of a century after the world’s pop stars gathered to banish it at Live Aid, raising £150m for relief efforts in 1985. Millions of impoverished Ethiopians face the threat of malnutrition and possibly starvation this winter in what is shaping up to be the country’s worst food crisis for decades.

Estimates of the number of people who need emergency food aid have risen steadily this year from 4.9 million in January to 5.3 million in May and 6.2 million in June. Another 7.5 million are getting aid in return for work on community projects, as part of the National Productive Safety Net Program for people whose food supplies are chronically insecure, bringing the total being fed to 13.7 million.

Donor countries provided sustenance to 12 million Ethiopians last year, more than half of it through the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP). Having passed that total only eight months into this year, and with the main harvest already in doubt, aid agencies fear the worst is still to come. “We’re extremely worried,” said Howard Taylor, who heads the Department for International Development’s office in Ethiopia. DfID has given £54m in aid to the country this year, and Britain has also contributed through the EU. “This is

“Critical water shortages” were reported in some areas by the UN’s Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs last week with water-borne diseases such as acute diarrhoea spreading as communities resort to drinking from insanitary wells and ponds. Unicef said that the outbreaks are putting extra pressure on its Out-Patient Therapeutic Programme, which provides healthcare in some of the most needy areas.

In Somali, the hardest hit region with a third of the humanitarian caseload and complications caused by a low-intensity insurgency, the mortality rate for infants has risen above two per 10,000 per day according to a regional nutrition survey, which gives newborns roughly a one-third chance of dying before their fifth birthdays. While there is no clear definition, one widely used threshold for famine is four infant deaths per 10,000 per day.

Declaring a famine is a political decision. While it can galvanise public opinion and bring millions into aid programmes, it is widely seen as a political failure. President George Bush challenged his officials to avoid the word, a policy known as “No famine on my watch”. Ethiopia’s Disaster Prevention and Preparedness Commission is charged with preventing famines of the 1984-85 type, the sort that bring down governments, argued Tufts University academics Sue Lautze and Angela Raven-Roberts in a 2004 paper.

Dismissing the warning signals, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, said earlier this month that there was no danger of famine this year. And Berhanu Kebede, Ethiopia’s ambassador to Britain, said at the weekend: “We are addressing the problem. Food is in the pipeline.”

The main practical difference between a food crisis and a famine is whether enough aid arrives to keep the starving alive. So while the scope of the problem can be measured in the number of hungry people, the severity depends on the generosity of those in the rich world. And this year they have been miserly. Despite the promise of G8 leaders at their summit in L’Aquila, Italy, last month to provide $20bn (£12bn) to improve food security in poor countries, contributions have slumped dramatically this year as donor states have shifted priorities to supporting banks and stimulating their own economies. “The international community is not living up to its promise to the World Food Programme,” Mr Kebede said.

The WFP had little trouble raising its $6bn budget last year, but in 2009 it has collected less than half of that. Its Ethiopian operation, which had $500m in 2008, is short $127m this year, equivalent to 167,000 tonnes of food. The Famine Early Warning Network forecast this month that the shortfall would reach 300,000 tonnes by December. Rations for the 6.2 million people receiving emergency food aid have, as a result, been slashed by a third from a meagre 15kg of cereals, beans and oil a month to just 10kg. Even if the shortfall were made up today, it would take three months for supplies to be loaded on to ships bound for Djibouti, then transferred to trucks for the arduous overland journey to land-locked Ethiopia.

Aid agencies are worried about the main harvest this autumn, arguing that the time for action is now, not when the food runs out in November – usually the driest month – let alone when starving children with distended bellies capture the attention of the West’s television viewing public. Despite its good intentions, Bob Geldof’s Live Aid came towards the end of the 1984-85 famine, which killed more than a million people. Since then, Ethiopia’s population has doubled to 80 million.

Mr Zenawi’s government has set up a strategic food reserve which has at times reached 500,000 tonnes – though it is currently thought to be just 200,000 tonnes – which it uses to speed up delivery. As soon as they get funds, aid agencies can borrow food from this reserve, replacing it with supplies from abroad when they arrive. Although the government could release this food without promises of replenishment, it would soon run out; after covering the WFP’s 167,000 tonne shortfall, the stockpile would be barely enough to feed a million people for three months.

The underlying problem for Ethiopia is the erratic behaviour of the country’s climate, or rather its regional micro-climates. Moisture-bearing clouds scudding in from the Indian Ocean can pass over the parched eastern lowlands to dump generous amounts of rain on the fertile western highlands. The famine of 1984-85, revealed by BBC reporter Michael Buerk, was actually two separate famines, one in Tigray, in the north, the other in Somali, in the south-east.

Two main rains sustain the people of Ethiopia, the belg in spring and the kiremt, which usually start in July. Both are influenced by variations in sea-surface temperature. The El Niño phenomena in the eastern Pacific usually bring droughts to Ethiopia, and America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts that the current El Niño will strengthen over the next six months. The belg has failed for two years running now, while the kiremt started three weeks late this summer and the amount of rainfall when they did come was below normal. Aid agencies fear that the season could end early, or, equally bad, produce delayed downpours just when farmers need dry weather for the harvest. Even if the kiremt ends on time in October, some crops may not reach maturity because of the late planting.

Ethiopia is overwhelmingly dependent on agriculture, and some 90 per cent of its crops are watered by nature rather than by man-made irrigation systems. During droughts, farmers and nomadic herders tend to sell off their assets to buy food, leaving them with nothing when the next growing season begins. It can take three to five years for pastoral tribes to rebuild their herds.

Although Ethiopia is particularly hard hit, drought has also affected neighbouring countries. Resources in Somali are under additional strain because nomadic tribesmen from Somalia and Kenya have driven unusually large numbers of cattle across the border in search of water and pasture. Estimates of the number of cattle coming into the country range from 95,000 to 200,000.

The spike in global food prices in 2008 exacerbated a worsening situation, hitting the urban poor particularly hard. While they have fallen back this year, the price for grains in the markets of Adis Ababa are still some 50 per cent higher than their average in the four years to 2007.

The Ethiopian government is acutely aware of the danger of famine, not least to itself. Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed a year after the 1973 famine and the Derg military junta led by Lt Col Mengistu Haile Mariam was overthrown in 1991 after a civil war driven in part by the 1984-85 famine. While most other countries with food shortages allow charities to distribute food, Ethiopia’s government insists that the bulk of food aid must pass through its hands.

The irony is that the Zenawi regime has done a reasonable job of boosting food production, achieving self-sufficiency in the late 1990s. One agency described it as the “bread basket” of Africa, harvesting more grain in a good year than South Africa. The government promotes best practices and distributes fertiliser to farmers. It also has an ambitious scheme to relocate 2.2 million people to more fertile areas. But even it can’t control the rains.

Many Africans blame climate change for the erratic weather patterns and resulting food shortages. Jean Ping, the chairman of the African Union, said last week in Adis Ababa: “Although Africa is least responsible for global warming, it suffers most from a problem it didn’t create.”

Thousands of infertile couples could be spared the pain, anguish and expense of fruitless IVF treatments, thanks to the discovery of a lock-and-key mechanism between sperm and egg cells.

The research could explain why so many couples with no apparent reproductive problems are unable to conceive. Although more than 40,000 in vitro fertilisation cycles are prescribed in Britain each year, only 10,000 births result.

In addition to the £5,000 cost of each cycle, the couples face huge amounts of stress and can suffer severe depression and in some cases divorce. “Our work has quite a lot of relevance for humans and society and one of the main ones is infertility,” said Dr Martin Brinkworth, a member of the team at the universities of Bradford and Leeds that discovered the lock-and-key mechanism.

Some 15 per cent of couples have trouble conceiving, about half of them because the man has a problem. But in only one third of cases is the cause obvious, such as a low sperm count, malformation or poor swimming ability. This leaves 2 per cent of the male population, about 330,000 adult men in the UK (not all of whom will be trying to have children), who are infertile for no discernable reason.

Dr David Miller at the University of Leeds thinks the secret could be that the genetic keys in their sperm don’t quite fit their partners’ locks. “Our research offers a plausible explanation for why some sperm malfunction,” he said.

His colleague Dr David Iles added: “There is a definite pattern to the way DNA is packaged in sperm cells. It is the same in unrelated fertile men, but it is different in the sperm of infertile men.”

If a test could be developed to identify these men, up to a quarter of women who have intrusive fertility checks would be spared the procedures. It could also sharply decrease the 75 per cent failure rate of IVF by filtering out male candidates who have no chance of success. Private patients and the NHS could save as much as £50m a year if all cases of male infertility were identified in advance.

The Leeds-Bradford research, and parallel work by a US team at the University of Utah, fundamentally changes our understanding of the importance sperm has in the developing embryo.

Although the egg and sperm each supply half the DNA for the new baby, the egg provides all the cellular support systems, including enzymes and proteins. Until now, it was thought that sperm simply delivered the father’s tightly packed DNA to the egg, leaving control and regulation of the process to the mother’s DNA.

But the two teams of scientists, have found that some genes are left exposed in sperm, in an “open conformation”, allowing them to play an important role in the development of the embryo. “It contradicts the dogma that the egg does everything,” said Dr Brinkworth, a senior lecturer at the University of Bradford.

The British team has also identified how these “open” areas are formed and evidence that they can be read by the egg, suggesting that they act as a signature or key, revealing the species the sperm comes from and signalling whether the DNA is in good shape.

Although no clinical test is available now, the researchers are hopeful that one can be developed after they’ve identified all the DNA bases in the open areas, some of which might be usable as markers.

The molecule at the heart of the lock-and-key mechanism is a protein called CTCF, say the scientists in a paper published in the journal Genome Research. “CTCF sets the stage during sperm development,” said Dr Iles. “And open bases can be recognised by CTCF in the egg.”

If stretched out end to end, the DNA from a single human cell would be about 1.8m long. But in the cell nucleus, it is wrapped around molecules called histones, which link up to form an efficient three-dimensional scaffold, 40,000 times shorter than the unfolded DNA. Histones also play a role in turning genes on so that their coded instructions can be copied and sent to other parts of the cell.

But sperm don’t have elaborate cells, just a tightly packed nucleus and a tail for swimming to the egg. So when they form, the histones are stripped off and replaced with another molecule called protamine, which shapes the DNA into an even tighter bundle, where the genes cannot be read.

The British researchers have found, however, that CTCF protects some histones in sperm from being replaced, leaving about 4 per cent of the genome in an open conformation, so that its instructions can be copied. Since the pattern of exposed areas is not random, they believe it must have a purpose, and the simplest explanation is that it is a key that influences the developing embryo even before the father’s genetic contribution has been unpacked.

The discovery has implications for research in fields other than human reproduction. Although the bulk of their work involved 50 million human sperm cells from several donors, the Bradford-Leeds team also found similar structures in mouse sperm.

The lock-and-key mechanism could help to explain how closely related species maintain their separate identities, even when individual members have sex. “DNA from different organisms can be extremely similar,” said Dr Iles. “Why do they not produce offspring, or if they do, why is it sterile, like mules and donkeys?”

The team speculates that this may have been the fate of prehistoric couplings between humans and their close cousins, Neanderthals, with incompatible keys and locks ensuring that any offspring would be unable to breed.

This would explain why the human genome has no trace of Neanderthal DNA despite the two similar species living close together for millennia.