Can You Smell What I can Smell?

Researchers at Imperial College, London, having been trying to find effective ways of monitoring air pollution in the capital, and beyond. They have developed a system of sensors that can either be deployed as stationary monitors of air quality, or as moving sensors, mapping air pollution.

The sensors can measure pollution levels as often as every five seconds, by using ultraviolet light to detect pollutants in the atmosphere. This means that the sensors can be placed on moving vehicles such as buses allowing mobile mapping of air quality. The senors are so compact, that they could even be carried by pedestrians and cyclists. They are able to detect five different pollutants in the air including nitrogen oxides and sulphur dioxides. For pedestrian users, the technology could also be adapted to measure carbon monoxide from cigarette smoke.

The data is transmitted via mobile phone technology, and tagged using Google Maps. The technology can even by adapted to simultaneously monitor air quality and traffic levels using harmless ultrasound waves to bounce off passing cars.

This development is the result of three years of research by the the Mobile Environmental Sensing System Across Grid Environments (MESSAGE) initiative, led by Imperial College London with contributions from the Universities of Cambridge, Leeds, Newcastle and Southampton. The project is jointly funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the Department for Transport.

Maturity Becomes You ... When Faced With Swine Flu

One notable feature of the swine flu pandemic is that the elderly seem to be somehow protected. They have largely been spared from infection with the virus, and this has kept the death toll remarkably low. Theories abound as to why this might be. It is, after all, rather unusual for the elderly to have many health advantages over their younger and often fitter compadres.

Traditionally, seasonal flu is the bane of the elderly. It tends to hit vulnerable individuals hard, especially when their health is complicated by pre-exisiting medical conditions - which we all seem to accumulate as we get older. Many deaths each year in the older population are attributable to seasonal flu. And yet, in this pandemic, most victims are young. More cases are occuring in the younger population - with schools providing perfect germinating conditions for the spread of the virus. In addition most deaths are occurring in younger individuals than might be expected. The news came today of the first death of an elderly patient from swine flu in this outbreak.

It seems likely that the elderly are actually displaying immunity to the current H1N1 strain of swine flu, and if this is the case they must have been exposed to a similar virus before. In 1977 there was an outbreak of 'Russian flu' which was a very similar H1N1 influenza virus. However, at the time of this outbreak, a similar phenomenon was noted. So the elderly must have experienced a prior protective exposure. At that time, it was postulated that there may have been outbreaks with similar viruses in the 1940s and 1950s.

Leonard Mermel, an American specialist in infectious diseases wrote “It might be that the H1N1 circulating now (swine-origin influenza virus) has enough antigenic similarity to related H1N1 influenza strains of the past to protect older individuals exposed to them previously,” in a letter to the The Lancet.

At least, with all the outbreaks in school-age children occuring at the moment, we can feel reassured that an outbreak with a similar H1N1 virus in fifty or sixty years time will see a further sparing of an elderly population.