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4 | NewScientist | 19 October 2013 WILL recognition bring some peace of mind to those honoured? The award of this year’s Nobel peace prize to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons comes at a critical time for the group, which has been struggling with low funding. OPCW staff made up the bulk of the UN team that last month confirmed the use of the nerve agent sarin in an attack near Damascus, Syria, in August. The OPCW is now overseeing an ambitious programme to destroy Syria’s chemical arsenal despite obstacles posed by the country’s ongoing civil war. “The prize is not just for helping to deal with a part of the Syrian crisis,” says Alastair Hay of the University of Leeds in the UK, who is training Syrian doctors to deal with the effects of chemical weapons. “The organisation has Sarin sleuths’ gong cajoled 190 countries into signing up to the 1997 Chemical Weapons Convention outlawing chemical weapons. This is painstaking, behind-the-scenes activity and we are all safer as a result.” Treaty experts say the OPCW, which is based in The Hague, the Netherlands, has been stretched thin lately, with a budget of less than €80 million and its importance apparently diminishing as nations increasingly abandon chemical weapons. Yet it must monitor efforts by the US and Russia to destroy their chemical arsenals – the world’s largest. “The OPCW has operated in obscurity for many years,” says Richard Guthrie, formerly with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Sweden. He says the prize is a tribute to efforts to eliminate a class of the most abhorrent weapons ever devised. At least five countries have not joined the convention, including Israel and Egypt. The OPCW’s Nobel is a thinly veiled suggestion that they should do so, say observers. Cyclone aftermath TWENTY-TWO lives lost is always 22 too many. But the death toll following cyclone Phailin’s lashing of the Bay of Bengal last weekend is a vast improvement on the 10,000 lost to a cyclone in the area in 1999, and an estimated 300,000 in 1970. Better forewarning, better preparation and better evacuation were the deciding factors this time. “Overall, it’s a success story in terms of saving lives,” says Tom Mitchell of the Overseas Development Institute in London, who co-authored a report this week on the impact of natural disasters on poor people. He says that, this time, the warnings were early enough to give the authorities time to organise the evacuation of 800,000 people. Despite the lives saved, Phailin still devastated property, leaving 500,000 homeless. Rehousing work will become more daunting because the Bay of Bengal is likely to experience more frequent and severe tropical storms as the climate continues to change. –Could we do without it?– Less bang for your buck WHAT would the world look like without the dollar supremacy? As New Scientist went to press, US officials were hammering out a deal to end the government shutdown and increase its debt limit. Meanwhile, some eyed alternatives to the US dollar to avoid a repeat threat of a global financial meltdown. Without a deal, the US treasury was expected to exhaust its ability to borrow money this week. Soon after, the government would be unable to pay all of its bills and then forced to default. The US dollar is the reserve currency for most of the world, so a default would be a significant shock to the global economy, perhaps comparable to the recession of 2008. China, the largest foreign owner of US treasury bonds, would feel much of the pain. Earlier this week, an editorial from its state news agency, Xinhua, called for a new international reserve currency to replace the dollar. “The Chinese are, with mixed emotions, pursuing a path of making their own currency more international,” says Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin in Madison. But don’t expect to be cashing in renminbi any time soon. “Governments still use the dollar, despite the current political dysfunction in Washington, because of its abundant availability, deep liquidity and wide acceptability, ” says Benjamin Cohen of the University of California, Santa Barbara. The last big shift in reserve currency, from British pounds to the US dollar, began in the 1950s and took two decades. “The Nobel prize is a tribute to efforts to eliminate the most abhorrent weapons ever devised” ”WE ARE less safe.” So Tom Frieden, head of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), tweeted on 1 October as he prepared to send almost 9000 staff home. Now, evidence shows that the mosquito- borne disease dengue fever has been spreading in Houston, Texas, since 2003. With the US government shutdown, efforts to control it and other infections may be compromised. In a study of blood samples taken from around 4000 people between Dengue may spread as CDC sleeps ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES 2003 and 2005, Kristy Murray and colleagues at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston found 47 of them had dengue. Two died (Vector-Borne and Zoonotic Diseases, doi.org/n9j). Different strains of the dengue virus have recently appeared in other southern states, meaning people might now encounter one strain, then another - which can trigger a deadly immune reaction. Tracking the strains requires surveillance that only the CDC can coordinate. UPFRONT
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