Perhaps it takes falling behind to know that you have to get ahead: shortly after The Lancet released a report today saying the World Health Organization had failed to meet its 2010 goal for global measles reduction, the WHO announced that it has a new, more ambitious target of eliminating measles and rubella—also known as German measles—in at least five of six global regions by 2020. The expanded goals come as Europe, despite its historically strong public health systems, is struggling to recover from more than 26,000 measles cases in 2011, a number on-par with developing countries such as Nigeria and Somalia.

As Europe redoubles its own immunization efforts at home, the WHO now must vaccinate an estimated 19 million children in India and sub-Saharan Africa if it hopes to meet the new 2020 target. “We have already seen India scaling up its efforts,” Jean-Marie Okwo-Bele, director of immunization at the WHO in Geneva, said at a teleconference this morning announcing the new goal. “The new [WHO] plan provides a good roadmap to eliminate measles by 2020.”

Measles is a highly contagious virus that can become airborne, making it crucial that virtually everyone in a region undergo vaccination if the disease is to be eliminated. It can spread rapidly to anyone who is not immune, often leading to death in children under five. The first vaccine against measles came in 1971, and it now costs as little as two cents per dose in developing countries. But as the European outbreak highlights, vaccine cost and availability are not the only barriers to getting people immunized. “Cultural and religious beliefs play a huge role in whether children receive the vaccine, both in Europe and elsewhere,” says Rebecca Martin, director of the global immunization division at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. She says one reason so many young Europeans are now susceptible to measles was false perception over the past fifteen years that the vaccine raised the risk of autism.

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Since it first arose more than 50 years ago, the methicillin-resistant staph infection known as MRSA has ravaged hospital wards around the globe, causing untreatable, often lethal, infections in people already weakened by disease. As with most cases of antibiotic resistance, the rise of the first MRSA bacteria was the fault of humans. The Staphylococcus aureus bacterium, which causes everything from respiratory infections to meningitis, mutated to become resistant to all the first-line drugs used to treat it—first penicillin, and later methicillin and other drugs known as beta-lactams.

But the story doesn’t end there. Since 1959, the drug-resistant superbugs have taken on many guises, evolving into five major lineages worldwide, each with slightly different genes that make the pathogens particularly deadly. Yet, how each strain’s killing power arose largely remains a mystery. Now, a paper published today in Nature Medicine takes a step toward explaining the killing mechanism of one particular strain from China. By sorting through a decade’s worth of superbugs isolated from Chinese hospitals, the authors have identified a resistance gene encoded by a mobile genetic element that helps S. aureus multiply in the noses, throats and lungs of susceptible patients.

“This is very exciting,” says study author Michael Otto, chief of the Pathogen Molecular Genetics Section at the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in Bethesda, Maryland. “This gene is a critical determinant how dangerous MRSA is to patients.”

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Biopiracy=stealing (indigenous) knowledge without proper compensation or credit in return.

Today’s New York Times carries a fascinating story about Marc van Roosmalen, a primatologist credited with discovering five species of monkeys and a new primate genus, who has been sentenced to nearly 16 years in a Brazilian jail.

van Roosmalen, one of Time magazine’s “Heroes for the Planet” in 2000, is charged with, among other things, taking monkeys from the forest without permits and offering to name new species after wealthy donors — a practice that is historically common in science, as the Times article points out.

Scientists are rallying to his defense, and 287 of them have signed a petition protesting his sentencing and saying it is indicative of the trend of government repression in Brazil. The government is apparently going overboard in its attempts to prevent biopiracy and, some say, making an example out of van Roosmalen.

This is all well and good. But this article is essentially a rehash of one that appeared in Nature three weeks ago. As anyone who works for scientific journals knows, this is par for the course. Articles that appear in Nature and Science routinely come out slightly modified in newspapers like the Times. And I suppose that’s fair enough. But my complaint here is that nowhere in the article is the acknowledgement that Nature first reported the story.

I’ll let the irony wash over you.

P.S. I particularly like the picture that ran with the Times article of this snake. Very eye-catching.

I’ve just returned from a two-week trip to Australia to scout out stories on the state of research in the country. We’re planning to run a special issue about Australia science early next year so you can read about it in detail then, but one thing I can tell you is I have never met a bunch of people who take more pride in their country.

Almost every scientist I spoke to had trained abroad and they all said they couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. They could go on — and do — for hours about the marvelous lifestyle. Despite the lack of jobs for young scientists, postdocs come back to Australia for the 9-to-5 days, the slower pace, the lack of intense competition all around them.

There’s no doubt that despite this lack of intensity, Australia does produce some world-class science. But here’s my question for you: Is it possible for scientists to lead this kind of laidback lifestyle and still stay competitive? Or would Australia be a much bigger contender in science if its researchers burned the midnight oil like their American and European counterparts do?