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News in perspective Upfront – IT WASN’T quite as bad as putting the fox in charge of the chicken coop. Still, the law takes a dim view when the head of the US Food and Drug Administration fails to own up to profiting from soft drinks and food while determining policy on obesity. Lester Crawford this week paid the price for this notable lapse. Crawford, who headed the FDA from 2002 to 2005, was due to learn his punishment on Tuesday after pleading guilty last year to conflict-of-interest charges. The most alarming was his failure to declare ownership of shares in the soft-drink and food companies Sysco and Pepsico while chairing an FDA working group on obesity in 2004. “It does not take a lawyer to determine that the country’s obesity tsar should not own stock in corporations that produce fast food, junk food and soft drinks,” says the attorneys’ sentencing advice to the court. As New Scientist went to press, it looked likely that Crawford would escape jail because he had declared and sold shares in drug companies before taking up his post. His recommended sentence was probation, community service and a fine of $50,000. FORCIBLY detaining people infected with a deadly strain of drug-resistant tuberculosis may be the only way to stop its spread. So say AIDS specialists in South Africa, where cases of extensively drug-resistant TB (XDR-TB) are spiralling out of control. In KwaZulu-Natal, the province hardest hit by South Africa’s HIV epidemic, 30 new cases of XDR-TB are being reported each month. HIV makes people easy prey to the disease, which is resistant to most anti-TB drugs and kills almost everyone it infects within 16 days. “If XDR-TB is not contained, completely drug-resistant TB is waiting in the wings to take its place,” says Jerome Singh at the Centre for AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa, based in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal, who is calling for the government to take firmer action (PLoS Medicine, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0040050). Cases of XDR-TB have been How much money would it take to turn the world’s largest temperate rainforest, currently a loggers’ paradise, into a conservation-based economy? Greenpeace calculated that it would cost some C$120 million (US$100 million) to work that transformation on the 64,000 square kilometres of the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia. Coincidentally that’s the exact sum that has now been pledged by Canada’s environment America can kick its addiction to fossil fuels by drilling more wells, says a panel of experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Not for oil, but to tap Earth’s heat. Converting geothermal heat into electricity by pouring water onto hot rocks underground and using the steam to turn turbines is arguably the most promising – and renewable – source of “green” energy on the planet. So concludes the MIT experts’ report, released on Monday, which examines what geothermal energy could do for the US in the 21st century. The 18-member panel calculated that there is more than enough extractable hydrothermal energy available to generate the entire 27 trillion kilowatt- hours of energy consumed in the US in CLEAN POWER UNDER OUR FEET 2005. In fact, a conservative estimate of the energy extractable from the hot rocks less than 10 kilometres beneath American soil suggests that this almost completely untapped energy resource could support US energy consumption, at its current clip, for more than two millennia to come. Developing a new generation of geothermal plants is thus a top priority for tackling global warming, the panel says. “By any kind of calculation, this is an extremely large resource that is technically accessible to us right now,” says the study’s lead author, Jefferson Tester. “It doesn’t require new technology to get access to it. And there’s never going to be a limitation on our ability to expand this technology because of limits of the resource.” STEPHEN SIMPSON/TAXI –A boost for the Kermode bear– STEVEN KAZLOWSKI/STILL PICTURES “In New York state, forcible confinement and treatment of TB cut infection rates” –Global warming, in a good way– Bear necessities Tsar punished No choice with TB 4 | NewScientist | 27 January 2007 www.newscientist.com reported all over the country but there are currently no infection control centres, except at King George V Hospital in Durban, which is treating just 11 patients. Singh wants South Africa to follow the example of New York state in the 1990s, where forcible confinement and treatment of people with TB cut infection rates. To sweeten the pill, the South African government needs to provide welfare benefits to XDR-TB patients while they are in hospital, so they don’t lose out on wages, Singh says. Such measures “can help contain the spread although they won’t stop it completely”, he warns.
