What it will take to stop the spiralling Ebola outbreak

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The tally of people with suspected and confirmed cases of Ebola in central Africa is rocketing upwards with shocking speed, but specialists say that we have the tools to control it thanks to hard-won expertise gained during previous Ebola epidemics. They recommend:

• Ramping up testing and contact tracing — a challenge in regions with limited testing capacity and other public-health resources.

• Providing supportive care, such as keeping people hydrated, which can drastically increase the chance of surviving even the Bundibugyo species of ebolavirus, for which there is no vaccine or targeted treatment.

• Building trust with communities to implement preventive measures that can sometimes clash with cultural traditions, such as washing or touching a body before burial.

Nature | 8 min read

A clinically dead 53-year-old man has become the first person to receive two kidneys and a liver from a genetically modified pig. The man’s organ function was sustained for almost five days with consent from his family, and there were no signs that the organs were being rejected in the first 24 hours. The procedure marks the first time that a whole pig liver has been transplanted into a person, and the first time a pig liver and kidneys have been transplanted into a human at the same time.

Nature | 4 min read

Reference: Med paper

Catalogue entries for more than 100 antibodies sold by the research services and supply company Thermo Fisher Scientific contain images that have apparently been manipulated, according to a pair of researchers who specialize in scientific integrity issues. Altered images don’t necessarily mean that the underlying products are defective. But the finding feeds into some researchers’ longstanding worries about the reliability of commercial antibodies, which are a key tool for studying proteins.

Nature | 8 min read

Reference: Database of ‘problematic images’

The explosion of one of aerospace company Blue Origin’s New Glenn rockets last week leaves NASA at least temporarily without a key partner for its ambitious plans to put people back on the Moon. No one was hurt in the blast, but the company’s rocket design is now being re-assessed and its launch facilities are heavily damaged. A mission to send scientific equipment to the lunar south pole was slated to launch later this year using one of Blue Origin’s rockets, but will be delayed at least until the damage is repaired.

Nature | 6 min read

Features & opinion

In Morbid, longevity researcher Saul Newman argues that all claims and counterclaims about an upper limit to human lifespan rest on shaky foundations. Many cases of extreme longevity — such as the ‘supercentenarians’ who live to an age of 110 or more — arise simply from faulty records, he says, raising broader questions about how ageing is measured and interpreted. “Extraordinary claims about extreme longevity deserve much more scepticism than they receive,” Newman tells Nature. “Claims are loudly platformed when they start and buried in silence when they fail.”

Nature | 10 min read

Obesity can be described as a chronic disease, but this label shouldn’t be applied uniformly to a condition that can affect individuals’ health so differently, argues surgeon Francesco Rubino. Instead, there should be two diagnoses: clinical obesity, in which excess fat tissue directly impairs daily activities or causes demonstrable organ dysfunction, and preclinical obesity, in which it doesn’t. The former is “unequivocally disease” while the latter represents elevated health risks, Rubino writes. This distinction can help clinicians know who to prioritize for treatment and avoids labelling people as diseased when they might not consider themselves to be ill.

Nature | 16 min read

Biophysicist Joseph Osmundson wrote a genre-defying memoir, Spawning Season, that explores the complexities of making a baby as a gay man alongside the odyssey of a spawning salmon. He speaks to three fellow queer authors — Lulu Miller, Lars Horn and Sabrina Imbler — who also used the science and wonder of sea life as routes to self-discovery in their recent books, Why Fish Don’t Exist, Voice of the Fish and How Far the Light Reaches respectively. “The magic of the sea,” writes Osmundson, is that “our animal eyes cannot easily see there, and so we are forced to study, to voyage, to imagine”.

Orion | 23 min read

On Friday, Leif Penguinson was exploring the lush greens of the rice terraces in Bali, Indonesia. Did you find the penguin? When you’re ready, here’s the answer.

Thanks for reading,

Flora Graham, senior editor, Nature Briefing

With contributions by Jacob Smith

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