Soap and chlorine image courtesy of UNICEF Guinea under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License (the image has been cropped)

Tensions continued to run high between Russia and the acting government of Ukraine as well-armed pro-Russian groups occupied strategic buildings across eastern Ukraine and skirmished with the Ukrainian military. An agreement between Russia, Ukraine, the US, and the EU to lower tensions fell apart when separatists captured military observers from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and refused to leave the buildings they were occupying.

The US called on Russia to “cease its illegal intervention and provocative actions in Ukraine” and imposed new sanctions on companies and people connected with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The EU followed with similar new sanctions of its own. Russian Deputy Minister for Foreign Relations Sergey Ryabkov called the sanctions “meaningless, shameful, and disgusting” and said that Russia’s response would “be painfully felt in Washington, D.C.” The US also deployed the USS Donald Cook, a destroyer equipped with the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System, to the Black Sea. Russia responded by accusing the US and NATO of breaking a commitment not to use antimissile assets in Europe against Russia’s nuclear deterrent force. And former Ukrainian Defense Minister Anatoliy Gritsenko accused the US and Britain had of betraying Ukraine. “They encouraged us to give up our nuclear weapons and said they would come to our defense,” Gritsenko said. “But instead, they’re just ‘deeply concerned’.”

The Marshall Islands is suing the nine countries known to have nuclear weapons—the US, Russia, China, France, the UK, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea—in the International Court of Justice. The Marshall Islands argues that the nuclear powers have failed to adhere to their obligation to disarm under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The NPT requires each signatory to

pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.

The US conducted 67 nuclear tests between 1946 and 1958 in the Marshall Islands. Those tests included the Castle Bravo test, which produced radioactive fallout that caused severe health problems in inhabited areas. The Marshall Islands’ filings estimate that the nuclear powers—largely the US and Russia—still have more than 17,000 nuclear warheads. The US released declassified information indicating that it has dismantled nearly 10,0000 warheads over the last 20 years and currently has 4,804 active and inactive warheads remaining. “The long delay in fulfilling the obligations enshrined in article VI of the NPT,” the Marshall Islands said, “constitutes a flagrant denial of human justice.”

The number of new cases of Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) increased dramatically in April. More new cases of the disease have been detected in 2014 than were detected in the previous period since the disease was discovered in early 2012. New cases were also detected in the first time in Malaysia, the Philippines, Greece, and Egypt. Fourteen countries have so far reported cases of MERS. Preliminary research has found little evidence that the disease has mutated to become more transmissible. The World Health Organization (WHO) said that the surge in new cases may be seasonal. WHO also noted that most of new cases were acquired from contact with other humans, which suggests that the disease may be more easily transmitted between people than had previously been believed. WHO said that there is an urgent need for “detailed outbreak investigations, case-control studies to understand risk factors for infections, enhancing community studies and surveillance of community-acquired pneumonia to assess whether significant numbers of mild cases resulting from human-to-human transmission are being missed, and identifying risk factors for infection in the hospital setting.”

The WHO Regional Office for Africa announced that the Ebola outbreak in Guinea was improving after 4 of the 6 locations that had reported cases went for 21 days—the upper end of the virus’ incubation period—without reporting any new cases. Harvey Fineberg wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine that the world is still “ill prepared to respond to an influenza pandemic or to any similarly global, sustained, and threatening public-health emergency”. Fineberg, who chaired the WHO committee to evaluate the global response to the 2009 H1N1 bird flu pandemic, said that we need to improve our ability both to detect and monitor outbreaks as well as to respond to them with effective treatments. And a new WHO report warns that the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria around the world is a major threat to public health. “Without urgent, coordinated action by many stakeholders,” WHO Assistant Director General Keiji Fukuda said, “the world is headed for a post-antibiotic era, in which common infections and minor injuries which have been treatable for decades can once again kill.”

The Journal of Virology published research demonstrating that with a small number of mutations the H7N1 bird flu virus could spread through the air among ferrets without any loss of virulence. The authors said that knowing which changes could make a bird flu virus capable of airborne transmission would help to identify and prevent potential pandemics. The research is similar to two controversial 2012 “gain-of-function” studies that showed the H5N1 bird flu virus could become transmissible through the air with a few mutations. Before the H7N1 paper was accepted, the University of Maryland’s Institutional Biosafety Committee, the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the American Society for Microbiology Journals Board agreed that the value of publishing outweighed the risk that the research could be used to make the virus more dangerous. But in an editorial accompanying the paper the journal editors called for a national advisory board to review this kind of potentially dangerous “dual use” research. “The risks,” National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity member David A. Relman said, “are that someone will use the mutation data to deliberately engineer an H7N1 strain to cause harm in mammals and humans in particular.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its third assessment report on mitigating climate change. The report found that the steps necessary to limit the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide before 2100 to 450 parts per million—which would likely keep global average temperatures from rising more than 2°C (3.6°F)—would slow global economic growth between 0.04% and 0.14% a year. The report also found the costs of slowing climate change would rise dramatically if the world waited until 2030 to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. “There are those who say we can’t afford to act,” US Secretary of State John Kerry said in response to the report. “But waiting is truly unaffordable. The costs of inaction are catastrophic.”

This news summary was put together in collaboration with Anthropocene. Thanks to Seth Baum, Kaitlin Butler, and Grant Wilson for help compiling the news.

For last month’s news summary, please see GCR News Summary March 2014.

You can help us compile future news posts by putting any GCR news you see in the comment thread of this blog post, or send it via email to Grant Wilson (grant [at] gcrinstitute.org).