Copenhagen Climate Change talks: where the EU is standing at

As the climate change and global warming talks in Copenhagen are drwaing closer, it is time to start reviewing where the European Union is standing at on the different issues at stakes and which its primary goals targets are.

The EU is pressing for a global, ambitious, comprehensive and legally binding international treaty that will prevent global warming from reaching the dangerous levels. The global warming average temperature needs to be kept below 2°C above the pre-industrial level in order to prevent the worst impacts of climate change.

Scientific evidence shows that, to put global emissions on a trajectory that is compatible with respecting this temperature ceiling, industrialised countries need to cut their greenhouse gas emissions to 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020 while developing countries need to limit their rapid emissions growth to around 15-30% below projected business as usual levels in 2020. Global emissions will have to peak by 2020 at the latest, be cut by at least 50% of 1990 levels by 2050 and continue to decline thereafter.

The EU has shown leadership by committing unconditionally to cut its emissions to at least 20% below 1990 levels by 2020. It is implementing the climate and energy package (see IP/09/628 ) as well as a programme of energy efficiency measures to achieve this. Moreover, it has committed to scale up its emission cut to 30% on condition that other industrialised countries agree to make comparable reductions and developing countries contribute adequately to a global deal.

However, emission targets put forward by industrialised countries so far add up to a reduction of only around 10-17% below 1990 levels by 2020, while the more economically advanced developing countries have offered little in terms of concrete action to control their emissions.

The European Council of 29-30 October committed the EU and Member States to contribute a fair share of the estimated €22-50 billion in additional international public finance that developing countries will need annually by 2020 under an ambitious agreement. A ll countries, except the least developed, should contribute to this total through an agreed global contribution key based on countries’ emission levels and ability to pay. Emission levels should have a considerable weight in the key and this should increase over time. Developing countries would be net recipients of international public finance.

The EU is also committed to providing its fair share of ‘fast-start’ financing to help developing countries build up their capacities to combat climate change over the period 2010-2012. The EU’s contribution will be decided in the light of the outcome of the final agreement. The European Commission estimates a global total of €5-7 billion could be needed annually over the three years following an ambitious global agreement.

Progress during the five negotiating sessions held this year has been slower than hoped for. At the Barcelona meeting last progress was made in streamlining the negotiating text on a number of technical issues. However, considerable work is still needed and consequently doubts have been voiced over whether a fully fledged treaty can be completed in Copenhagen as originally intended

The EU hopes this will still be possible, but should this not be the case the minimum outcome in Copenhagen must be a strong framework agreement covering the essential building blocks of the new treaty and a deadline for completing it. The essential elements are: (an ambitious set of emission reduction commitments by developed countries including the United States; adequate action by developing countries to curb their emissions growth); and a financial deal to assist developing countries in mitigating their emissions and adapting to climate change.

In Barcelona the EU underlined its readiness to do everything to complete a fully-fledged treaty as soon as possible .

The international negotiations are being conducted on two parallel ‘tracks’. On one track the 194 Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which include the U.S., are discussing long-term cooperative action to combat climate change. On the other track the 184 Parties to the Kyoto Protocol, which do not include the U.S., are discussing post-2012 emission reduction commitments for industrialised countries except the U.S.

The EU has made clear its preference for this two-track approach to lead to a single, legally binding international treaty. This must incorporate and build on the essential elements of the Kyoto Protocol, such as emission reductions by industrialised countries, market-based mechanisms, accounting rules for changes in emissions due to land use, land use change and forestry, and a strong compliance regime.

A single treaty would have the benefit of creating a single institutional framework for all Parties requiring one ratification process. It would also bring all developed countries under one international climate regime. The treaty needs to be ratified in time to enter force on 1 January 2013.

The EU will honour all its commitments and obligations under the Kyoto Protocol, regardless of the outcome of the Copenhagen process.

 

 

Key EU objectives for a new UN climate change agreement:

• It should be global in terms of participation, comprehensive in scope and legally binding.
• It should be ambitious enough to prevent global warming exceeding 2°C above the pre-industrial temperature (equivalent to around 1.2°C above the temperature today).
• It should reflect the international scientific consensus as represented by the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
• Global greenhouse gas emissions should peak by 2020 at the latest, be at least halved from 1990 levels by 2050 and continue to decline thereafter.
• Industrialised countries must take the lead by cutting their collective emissions by around 30% below 1990 levels by 2020.
• Developing countries as a group should limit their rapid emissions growth by achieving by 2020 a substantial deviation – in the order of 15-30% – below the currently predicted emissions growth rate.
• It must create incentives to slow and eventually stop tropical deforestation. It should set the objectives of reducing gross tropical deforestation by at least 50% by 2020 compared to current levels and halting global forest cover loss altogether by 2030 at the latest.
• It should include global targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from international aviation by 10% and from international maritime transport by 20% by 2020, compared to 2005 levels.
• It should include a Framework for Action on Adaptation to climate change aimed at building a more climate-resilient society and increasing adaptation assistance to the poorest and most vulnerable developing countries.
• Provisions on financing research, development, deployment and diffusion of technologies should be part of the agreement, with the aim of substantially increasing private and public energy-related research, development and deployment from current levels.
• It should include a significant scaling up of public and private financial flows – including through the carbon market – to help developing countries with adaptation, mitigation, deforestation reduction, technology and capacity building activities.
• It should include enlargement and reform of the international carbon market in order to drive low-carbon investments and achieve global emission objectives cost-efficiently. The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and Joint Implementation mechanism should be reformed to improve their effectiveness and environmental integrity, and to broaden participation in the CDM, particularly by the least developed countries. New sectoral crediting and trading mechanisms should be established for highly competitive sectors in more advanced developing countries, and the CDM phased out for these.

New European register gives access to information on emissions from European industrial sites

The European Commission and the European Environment Agency today launched a comprehensive new European pollutant release and transfer register – E-PRTR. The register contains information about the emissions of pollutants to air, water and land by industrial facilities throughout Europe. It includes annual data for 91 substances and covers more than 24 000 facilities in 65 economic activities. It also provides additional information, such as the amount and types of waste transferred from facilities to waste handlers both inside and outside each country.

Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said: “Transparency is a vital tool for improving our environment. The opening of this register will give citizens direct access to information on emissions from facilities across Europe and will help them to engage actively in decisions affecting the environment. It demonstrates a genuine commitment by the public authorities and industry to share information with citizens and increase openness.”

Professor Jacqueline McGlade, Executive Director of the European Environment Agency, said: “To achieve the public participation objective set by the Aarhus Convention, people first need to know what is happening to their environment and what is at stake. With this new register, we take an important step in placing more environmental information at their fingertips. Anyone can now see how much pollution is being released to air and water from facilities in their neighbourhood or region.”

In order to improve public access to environmental information, a new E-PRTR register has been set up, containing data reported by individual facilities. The register provides details of pollutants released from individual facilities to air, water and land in 2007, covering 30% of total NOx (nitrogen oxides) emissions and 76% of total SOx (s ulphur oxides) emissions to air in the EU-27 countries and Norway. The register also shows the amount of waste and waste water transferred to other locations, including transboundary transfers of hazardous waste, and gives preliminary information on pollutants from ‘diffuse’ sources released to water, such as nitrogen and phosphorus loss from agriculture.

The website has a powerful search engine that allows visitors to search using one or more criteria and a map tool. For example, visitors can search the amount of hazardous and non-hazardous waste transferred from facilities in a country (waste search), or releases from a specific industrial site by name or location (facility search).

E-PRTR reveals, for example, that:

• Often a small number of facilities make large overall contributions to the total amount of pollutants released in Europe. For instance, just five large combustion plants were collectively responsible for more than 20% of all E-PRTR sulphur oxide emissions to air in 2007. Sulphur oxides contribute to both environmental acidification and the formation of health-damaging particulate matter;
• More than 54 million tonnes of hazardous waste were transferred from E-PRTR facilities. Most hazardous waste is recovered or disposed of within the country where it originates; just a small fraction of it (approximately 6%) is transported across borders.

Software designed to analyse disease causes

Software that will model diseases and calculate probable causes could help doctors pick the optimal treatment.

Some brain tumours in children remain benign and doctors choose not to operate. But a small percentage of those will suddenly start to grow aggressively.

Doctors have not identified what triggers that aggressive tumour growth, despite the vast array of data they hold on their child patients – demographic, environmental, genetic and clinical data, as well as images such as MRI and CAT scans of the developing tumours.

But a new software tool called AITION can integrate all the medical data from a tumour patient and then analyse it to calculate the probable factors that are stimulating tumour development, combining up to 30 correlated variables. AITION provides an overview of the causal relationship across all factors.

AITION’s conclusions are displayed as a ‘knowledge model’, a graphical network of medical factors with links that represent the correlations between them. Strongly interdependent concepts are directly connected, loosely dependent concepts are not connected at all. The patient’s doctors can play around with the knowledge model. They can improve the model by adding information they know to be true about the patient. They can use the model to test the likely effects of different types of medication, surgery or treatments on the tumour’s growth and the patient’s health.

“We have shown the knowledge models to doctors treating brain tumours, juvenile idiopathic arthritis, [as well as] to cardiologists and they have found it quite intuitive,” says Harry Dimitropoulos, one of the researchers from the University of Athens where AITION is being developed as part of the EU-funded Health-e-Child project.

“Because of the graphical way it presents the data they have found it easy to click on the links. Some training is required if they want to look in depth at how conclusions were reached, or to modify the statistics or the graph.”

The causal-probabilistic algorithms within AITION are well established, solid and reliable, according to Dr Dimitropoulos. However, because the diseases are rare, data is available on only small numbers of children. An AITION test on juvenile idiopathic arthritis had only 50 patients initially. That has been expanded to 200 and the tool is becoming more stable and more reliable.

AITION’s logic can lead to mistakes. For instance, if most of the patients over 16 years old in a knowledge model are also smokers, AITION may infer that being a smoker causes one’s age to be over 16. To try to eliminate that kind of error, AITION uses a priori knowledge encapsulation (grouping variables in hierarchies) to constrict the possible conclusions that can be drawn from the data.

The researchers’ next step will be to link AITION to ontologies of medical data (exhaustive databases of facts and concepts on a particular topic) to provide even more context for AITION’s probability calculations and predictions.

The team also wants to expand the number of variables that can be considered in AITION’s calculations of causal probability. “In theory, AITION can be expanded to as many features as you want,” says Dimitropoulos. “We are preparing a mechanism that uses partitioning and parallel processing to create sub-graphs that can then be merged. But this is research at an early planning stage.”

The very fact that AITION can model all the factors in a disease to give doctors an overview of the problem is an advantage, stresses Dimitropoulos.

AITION has already analysed data to infer likely disease causes or optimal future treatments that match the assessments of the doctors. But it adds even greater value when the models start to generate new knowledge. Already, AITION has identified that one blood test may be unnecessary because the information it provides is available from other sources. It will require results from many more patients to validate this.

The team is also planning to identify unique factors about the tumours that become aggressive by combining genetic markers with clinical and other data in AITION. Identification, followed by early surgical intervention, would be a major medical step forward.

Disease-matching software could save children

By matching children with rare or life-threatening diseases and modelling potential disease progression, researchers hope to find new routes forward.

Software tools are being developed that can search and compare patient data at hospitals across Europe to find children with closely matched conditions. The doctors can then study how the matched patients at other hospitals were treated and whether that treatment was successful. The information will greatly improve doctors’ ability to choose the right path for their own patient.

The tools being developed within the Health-e-Child project can compare a vast range of structured and unstructured data, including genetic and clinical data, as well as images from CAT and MRI scans and other records.

The Health-e-Child system, protected by high security, links anonymised databases of patient information at hospitals in Paris, Genoa, Rome and London. There are plans to extend the network to 25 hospitals.

Health-e-Child researchers are working on tools for three complex paediatric diseases with at least partly unknown causes: heart diseases resulting from an overload of the right ventricle, juvenile idiopathic arthritis, and brain tumours (gliomas).

The EU-funded project has tackled fundamental data sharing infrastructural problems as well as ethical and data protection questions, data analysis and data mining issues. Both disease-specific and cross-disease tools have been developed.

For unstructured data such as images, the Health-e-Child project has created tools that translate visual information into machine-readable (and therefore machine-comparable) language. The project’s 3D registration tool for MRI scans, and its MRI ‘erosion scoring’ system for juvenile idiomatic arthritis have been recognised as important advances in their fields.

Health-e-Child’s CaseReasoner tool enables clinicians to search thousands of disease diagnoses, treatments and outcomes to find a child similar to their own patients. The clinicians set the search parameters themselves. In the case of heart patients, clinicians could include factors they consider important, such as genetic markers, the age of the child, the heart rate – even the amount of exercise the child takes.

The results can be displayed as a ‘network’ with cohorts of patients with similar diagnoses clustered together and colour-graded accorded to the level of similarity. Clinicians can then dive into the detailed data on any of the patients or clusters to better understand their diagnoses and the success of the procedures the patients have been through.

The CaseReasoner could also be used to search out the procedures that have been most successful, giving the clinician insights into the optimal path forward.

The AITION tool, being developed by Health-e-Child researchers at the University of Athens, seeks to go further. AITION will use semantic tools to search medical literature and interviews with clinicians as well as patient data. Drawing on well-established causal-probability algorithms, AITION will suggest probable disease development. Doctors using AITION will then be able to test their hypotheses on optimal treatment.

Other Health-e-Child researchers have combined a heart modelling tool called CardioWiz with MRI scan measurement software from Siemens, according to Siemens Healthcare’s Martin Huber, technical leader of the Health-e-Child project. The combination can rapidly generate animated 3D models of a particular patient’s heart. The patient’s doctors can play with the models and simulate the effects of heart surgery or drug treatments to see how the heart would respond.

The lack of research into child disease adds to the significance of Health-e-Child, says Jörg Freund, from Siemens Healthcare and Health-e-Child project coordinator. Because the numbers of children suffering from these diseases are small, there is little incentive for commercial companies to research them. Some pharmaceutical companies calculate drug doses for children simply on weight – treating the child as a mini-adult. This fails to take account of important differences between children and adults. The most obvious difference is that children are growing.

Research on children can give important insights into the role of genetics in disease. Environmental factors can be less important in child diseases, simply because there has usually not been time in the child’s short life for the environment to have had much effect.

Following their successes, the Health-e-Child researchers are publishing an exploitation plan mapping out how Health-e-Child’s partners will take it forward.

A praise of Capitalism

An open economy and free markets prevent armed conflicts, says Professor Indra de Soysa, professor of political science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and research director for the university’s globalization programme. De Soysa says “Capitalism creates peace,” which sounds like a slogan from an embattled market liberal, but de Soysa has empirical evidence for his claim.

“When we look at all the factors that contribute to preventing conflicts, economic freedom is very important, even in relation to other factors such as good governance, democracy and human rights,” he says.

The Globalization Effect

Along with colleagues at NTNU and the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO), de Soysa has made a thorough study of the effects of globalization on internal conflicts.

“Our starting point was this: Does globalization contribute to peace and prosperity, or does neo-liberalism result in a ‘race to the bottom’ that weakens states and sharpens social conflicts, as critics claim?” de Soysa explains.

Invisible hand or iron fist?

It’s an old debate. De Soysa can link this question all the way back to Adam Smith and his idea of the “invisible hand” from the 18th century, which fundamentally states that if people act in their own interest, it also serves the common good. But Karl Marx believed that “the market’s invisible hand” was a iron fist that resulted in exploitation and class differences, and therefore sharpened conflicts.

The current debate about globalization is divided largely along the same ideological lines, de Soysa says. But his research is empirically based, not ideologically based, he says, which means he has hard facts.

“I’m an empiricist, not an ideologue. We wanted to examine these relationships with empirical methods,” he said.

Economic freedom matters most

De Soysa and his colleagues have concentrated on PRIO’s comprehensive database of conflicts from 1970 onwards. The researchers compared this to data that describe economic freedom, and checked a number of other variables that are relevant in damping or sharpening the danger of armed conflict.

“Our results are clear and robust: the higher the degree of economic freedom, the smaller the risk of internal conflicts. The study shows in fact that economic freedom counts more than factors such as democracy and good governance when it comes to preventing armed conflict,” says de Soysa.

Economic freedom is defined as investment-friendly policies that support free markets, effective protection of private property, individual economic freedom of choice and limited government intervention.

When the rebellion is worthwhile

De Soysa use the term “alternative cost” ( “opportunity cost”) to explain the peace-building effect of open markets. Armed rebellion, or crime, can simply be considered as the most profitable investment, because the options are so limited.

“A closed economy, for example, with state monopolies, forces entrepreneurs into the shadows. That’s why you get trafficking, organized crime – or armed rebellion. When the state controls the financial resources, as in the oil-rich states, there are also economic benefits to be had by taking over state power, and the risk of conflict increases,” de Soysa says.

“Rebellion has a price tag, like all other investments. You have to obtain weapons and organize groups. The Tamil Tigers spent 350 million U.S. dollars a year to buy weapons, for example,” de Soysa says, citing an example from his homeland of Sri Lanka.

In an open economy there are likely to be considerably greater gains from investing money and effort in the marketplace. In these kinds of societies there is much less risk of accumulating “rebel capital”.

“Look at the civil wars in Africa: What might have happened if Charles Taylor (warlord and former president of Liberia) would have earned more by investing in productive activities than from rebellion?” de Soysa wonders.

How can we create peace?

Norway markets itself as a peaceful nation, and has been engaged in a long series of attempts to resolve conflicts around the world. De Soysa summarizes this effort as “100 percent failure.”

“Recognizing that an open, functioning market is a guarantee of peace should have consequences both for development assistance and peace efforts,” he says.

“Traditional aid has neither resulted in peace or development. On the contrary, aid can stimulate a dependent economy that inhibits profitable investments. If we want to contribute to peace and development, it would be better to help to build functional markets that make it profitable to invest in productive activities rather than in armed conflict,” de Soysa says.

The results of de Soysa’s study are being considered for publication in the renowned journal “Journal of Peace Research”.

Supercomputer Experts met at the First European Workshop on HPC Centre Infrastructures

The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre – CSCS in collaboration with CEA of France and BAdW-LRZ of Germany organized the first European workshop on HPC infrastructures on 2–4 September 2009, in Origlio, Switzerland. This event brought together for the first time experts in construction and operation of supercomputing facilities from Europe and around the world, including members of the PRACE project.

Infrastructure managers of High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities around the world are increasingly facing challenges in accommodating the requirements of current and future generations of supercomputer architectures. Power consumption and energy density push infrastructures, cooling technologies and operational budgets to the limit. Due to this development, building infrastructures have become a strategic asset of supercomputing centres.

The goal of the first European HPC Infrastructure Workshop was to initiate an exchange of knowledge and experiences in this area. 55 experts came together to discuss topics such as building design, facility management and operation, energy efficiency, cooling technologies and computer cooling designs. Speakers from APC, ASHRAE, Bull, CEA, Cray, CSCS, EYP, Green Grid, IBM, Intel, NCSA, RZ Integral, SGI, SUN, the University of Illinois and the Uptime Institute shaped this event with presentations of high technical quality. Participants also had plenty of opportunities to network and exchange ideas and information.

Based on the success of the workshop and the interest demonstrated by the attendees, a second European Workshop on HPC Infrastructures will be hosted next year by CEA in France.

 

ESA calls for ideas for science research against global warming

ESA is looking for ideas to use the International Space Station as a platform to conduct research into global climate change. The International Space Station (ISS) is a manned orbital platform with a permanent crew of six. Its assembly will be completed next year, providing a multipurpose research facility in low orbit until 2015 and possibly beyond. Europe’s scientific community is already using the ISS in a multitude of areas such as life and microgravity sciences, and now Earth science and climate change initiatives are to be considered too. Potentially, it can be used as an observation platform for studies into global change, supplementing observations from dedicated satellites.

“The ISS is the obvious laboratory on which, with which and from which we can really help our planet, understand it and develop countermeasures to protect it, and to protect ourselves,” said Simonetta Di Pippo, ESA Director of Human Spaceflight.

“On the ISS we are developing and testing technologies that find a direct application in improving life back on Earth. As we are about to complete the ISS and look into extending its lifetime to 2020 and beyond, using it as a platform to collect data and study Earth phenomena is the clear demonstration that human spaceflight does serve terrestrial needs.

“This is the case since the first astronauts realised how fragile our Earth is as seen from space. I hope therefore that this Call for Ideas finds a lot of resonance within the Earth science community and I am looking forward to many interesting proposals.”

Instruments can be attached outside the Station, especially on Europe’s Columbus laboratory, as well as positioned inside to view through windows. The orbit inclination of 51.6° and altitude of 350–460 km are different to those of most Earth observation satellites, offering other ground patterns over an area that covers about 95% of Earth’s population.

ESA has issued a Call for Ideas to gauge the interest in deploying remote-sensing instruments for global change experiments on the ISS. Depending on the level of interest and the suitability of the research proposals, it may be followed by a specific Announcement of Opportunity for instruments or multi-user payloads.

Color-perfect, beautiful and environment-friendly: the new tablet by BASF

Distinctive coloring, robust and rapidly soluble: a new BASF tablet coating system enables individual, on-site production of tablet coatings in countless shades from only seven basic colors. A combination of the tried and tested water-soluble BASF IR film former Kollicoat® with a new production process and novel color concept makes tablet coating production more efficient.

Its excellent processing properties are what make the polymer so special: Kollicoat IR has low viscosity and allows a shorter spray process because it can accommodate high concentrations of solids. As a result, pharmaceutical manufacturers cut their energy bills and spare the environment by reducing CO2 emissions in the production process. Other benefits: the granules are dust-free and have excellent flowability, which greatly simplifies handling during the production process. The BASF coating system module consists of just seven basic colors which are combined to produce the desired color. Hence, tablet manufacturers can optimize their inventories and the supply chain benefits from less complexity.

 

 

 

Kollicoat IR is a graft copolymer composed of polyethylene glycol and polyvinyl alcohol. It is extremely flexible and does not require additional plasticizer. The polymer dissolves rapidly in the stomach, resulting in prompt release of the active substance and rapid onset of action after the tablet is swallowed.

 

 

 

Since elderly people in particular may have difficulty telling tablets apart, more and more pharmaceutical manufacturers are starting to package active substances in colored tablets. A striking color supports and enhances treatment compliance and also prevents mix-ups during tablet production.

La Cina alla conquista del mercato delle auto “verdi”

SAIC Motor Corp, la maggiore azienda automobilistica cinese, ha annunciato l’intenzione di investire $879 milioni nei prossimi due anni nello sviluppo e produzione di automobili ecosostenibili. L’investimento avverrà principalmente in tre aree: ricerca e sviluppo, componenti e costruzione di impianti industriali.

L’annuncio lo ha dato lo stesso presidente del consiglio di amministrazione dell’azienda cinese, Hu Maoyuan, all’agenzia di stampa di stato Xinhua all’inizio di novembre.

I piani prevedono il lancio della Roewe 750, una berlina ibrida basata sulla Rover 75, l’anno prossimo a cui farà seguit, nel 2012, un modello completamente elettrico, Roewe 550.

Al Shanghai Motor Show in Aprile, SAIC mise in mostra un prototipo di berlina a motore alimentato da celle a combustibile basato sulla Roewe 750. Sviluppato in collaborazione con la scuola di ingegneria atuomobilistica della Tongji University di Shanghai, è ritenuta la sola macchina a celle all’idrogeno costruita in Cina. Una data di lancio del veicolo non è ancora stata annunciata.

Almeno sette produttori automobilistici cinesi hanno piani per lo sviluppo di veicoli elettrici e ibridi quest’anno. L’intenzione è contrastare l’importazione di automobili “verdi” da produttori stranieri, in particolare dal vicino Giappone.

Il mercato delle automobili ecosostenibili, in Cina, è ancora in fasce, con sole 889 Toyota Prius vendite in tutta la Cina l’anno scorso, secondo la National Passenger Car Information Exchange Association.

H1N1 vaccine not responsible for rise in miscarriages, scientists claim

A new international study calculates that up to 400 out of every million pregnant women who receive such swine-flu shots will experience a miscarriage within 24 hours.  But scientists deny it will be because of their flu shots.

The average background miscarriage rate for any given day (among women far enough along to recognize they are pregnant) is about 397. Or so reports a new international analysis, which appeared online October 30, ahead of print, in the Lancet. To see an impact of the vaccine on pregnancy losses, miscarriage rates would have to spike well above that roughly 400-per-million figure, it notes.

If policymakers, physicians and the public don’t understand the magnitude of background rates for diseases and health impacts, they risk inappropriately attributing certain adverse events to vaccines.

Internet web browsing together with public concern about the safety of vaccines “have increasingly allowed for spurious associations to be promoted as fact,” note Steven Black of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and his international team of colleagues. Reports of false associations “can and do disrupt immunization programmes, often to the detriment of public health,” these researchers argue in the Lancet.

For the new analysis, the team pored over published papers reporting incidence figures for a number of conditions that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration noted could turn out to be possible side effects of vaccinations. These included infectious polyneuritis, also known as Guillain-Barré syndrome (an autoimmune disease that can cause muscle weakness and sometimes paralysis); multiple sclerosis; sudden inflammation of the optic nerve; Bell’s palsy; anaphylaxis (a potentially life-threatening whole-body allergic reaction); seizures, sudden death (within two hours of symptoms developing); an autoimmunity-linked reduction in blood platelets (thrombocytopenia); miscarriages and preterm labor.

The researchers found that incidence rates for some of these conditions can be relatively high — and can vary widely by country, gender, age or other factors.

Take Guillain-Barré syndrome. Some 1976 swine-flu shots were associated with a seeming up-tick in Guillain-Barré cases, so that disorder will be on the radar screen of epidemiologists looking at the safety of the new H1N1 vaccine.

The background incidence of this syndrome in Finland ranges from about 0.2 cases per 100,000 in boys who are 17 and under (about one-tenth the rate of girls there) to 10 per 100,000 men 65 and older (a somewhat higher rate than afflicts this Scandinavian nation’s Golden Girls). In the United States and Britain, however, boys and girls have roughly comparable rates of Guillain-Barré syndrome, although they vary by country — with slightly fewer than one case per 100,000 in the United Kingdom and almost double that in the States. Those rates climb to only between 2.5 and 4.5 per 100,000 in the UK’s post-65 set and peak at just 2.3 to 3.3 per 100,000 women and men over age 65 in the United States.

Black’s team argues that it’s important to identify background national rates of this and other diseases before panic sets in as someone attributes his or her flu shot to triggering Guillain-Barré paralysis. For instance, the new analysis predicts that perhaps four cases of this autoimmune disease per 10 million vaccinated people might be expected to occur within one week of their getting flu shots — just based on background rates — and 22 cases within six weeks.

For sudden death, background incidence would suggest that among every 10 million vaccinated people, five or six such deaths might spontaneously occur — unrelated to flu — within six weeks of getting flu shots.

One problem, of course, is that if five people in the Boston metro area develop Guillain-Barré syndrome within a week of getting flu shots, someone might attribute it to the vaccine, even if no other cases occur across the rest of the country. Such apparent hot spots occasionally emerge, only to later turn out to be random flukes. Before they’re confirmed as such, however, news accounts might unleash a panic that shuts down vaccination rates in Boston and elsewhere — allowing pandemic flu to spread unchecked.

In a commentary accompanying the new Lancet analysis, Frank DeStefano and Jerome Tokars of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta point to another underlying problem: How vaccine-monitoring systems collect reports of adverse events. They provide a numerator that might point to potential problems. But unless there’s also a denominator, it can still be hard to know if adverse incidents are truly unusual in number. And, in fact, most nations have not been good about collecting fairly real-time vaccination counts that are stratified by age, gender or region.

The United States and other nations will try to glean such data in coming months. But unless they’re enormously successful — and quick — DeStefano and Tokars argue that epidemiologists could find themselves seriously hampered in trying to establish whether serious vaccine side effects are emerging — or only seem to be.