science.org SCIENCEPHOTO: ROBERTO GUERRA/ZUMAPRESS/NEWSCOMWatchdog chides health agency
PUBLIC HEALTH | The auditing arm of
the U.S. Congress last week slammed the
Department of Health and Human Services
(HHS) for “persistent deficiencies” in its
response to the coronavirus pandemic
and past public health emergencies. For
example, HHS still has no comprehensive
COVID-19 testing strategy, according to a
27 January report from the Government
Accountability Office (GAO). The problems
date back more than 10 years to other
crises, including the H1N1 influenza pan-
demic, the Zika and Ebola virus outbreaks,
and the public health threats posed by
natural disasters such as hurricanes. The
failures leave the nation vulnerable to
future viruses and weather events, GAO
says. In tandem with the release of the
report, GAO announced it has added HHS
leadership and public health emergency
coordination to its list of “high-risk” issues
that Congress and the executive branch
should address. The list now highlights
37 problems at more than a dozen agen-
cies, with some dating back to 1990.Malaria bed nets protect long term
PUBLIC HEALTH | Bed nets can save young
children from malaria, but some research-
ers have worried about a “rebound effect,”
in which children succumb to the disease
later in life because they lack natural
immunity. A new, unusual follow-up study
has dispelled those fears. Researchers
tracked down nearly 6000 people who,
as infants or toddlers, had been part of
a study in Tanzania that measured the
efficacy of insecticide-treated bed nets
between 1998 and 2003. Among the
participants—young adults today—they
found no sign of a rebound effect: Those
who, decades ago, slept under a bed net
more than half the time still had a 40%
survival advantage in 2019 over those
who slept under nets less frequently,
according to the study in this week’s issue
of The New England Journal of Medicine.Breyer shaped law on experts
LAW | U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen
Breyer, who last week announced he willNEWS
“
Underserved communities ... have been waiting long
enough, and they are counting on us to get this right.
”
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan, about the
agency’s new plans to increase monitoring of industrial pollution implicated in high cancer rates.A
nearby gold rush has left protected jungles in the Peruvian
Amazon polluted with toxic mercury at among the world’s high-
est levels, comparable to those in forests near major industrial
cities in China, a study has found. Small-scale, illicit gold miners
around the world, often in impoverished regions such as Peru’s
Madre de Dios, use mercury to separate gold flakes from rawore. The mercury is then burned off to extract the gold. In a protected
forest near a Peruvian mining hot spot, researchers found mercury
in tree leaves, runoff, and soil at levels up to 15 times higher than in
nearby unforested areas, according to an article last week in Nature
Communications. The results—the first tracking the toxic metal’s path-
way through forests near mine sites—suggest forests act as a mercury
sponge, concentrating and storing it. But some mercury also finds
its way into water bodies, where it is transformed to the more toxic
methylmercury, the researchers discovered; that chemical showed up in
the forest’s songbirds at levels that would impair reproduction. Small-
scale, “artisanal” gold mining recently outstripped coal burning as the
world’s single largest source of airborne mercury pollution, annually
releasing as much as 1000 tons.
ENVIRONMENT
Gold mines flood forests with mercury
IN BRIEF
Edited by Jeffrey Brainard474 4 FEBRUARY 2022 • VOL 375 ISSUE 6580
A miner in Madre de Dios in Peru pours a mixture of mercury and gold into a container.