SCIENCE sciencemag.orgCREDITS: (PHOTO) ANDREW TESTA/
THE NEW YORK TIMES
; (GRAPHIC) J. BRAINARD AND J. MERVIS/
SCIENCE
;
(DATA) SCIENCE & ENGINEERING INDICATORS 2020/U.S. NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATIONnotes that North Korea’s supply of such
drugs is expected to run out by June, and
that treatment lapses in patients infected
with multidrug-resistant TB strains
can lead to even more recalcitrant strains.EPA advisers pan water rule
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE | Advisers
have criticized as scientifically unfounded
a decision by the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) to narrow the
scope of protections under the Clean
Water Act—changes that would leave
about half of U.S. wetlands vulnerable to
being harmed or destroyed. In a rule final-
ized 23 January that reversed one issued
under former President Barack Obama,
the Trump administration asserted that
only “navigable waters” qualify for protec-
tion; the new policy omits streams that
dry up occasionally and wetlands joined
to lakes or rivers only via groundwater.
In a 27 February letter to the agency’s
head, EPA’s Science Advisory Board
objected, citing research findings that
indirect connections with larger water
bodies make these smaller sites important
for water quality and ecological health.The advisers also warned that irrigation
canals—excluded from protection under
the new rule—can contaminate crops with
dangerous bacteria.DRC counts down to Ebola-free
INFECTIOUS DISEASE | The 19-month Ebola
outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the
Congo may be nearing an end. Last week,
a treatment center in Beni released its final
patient, starting the 42-day countdown—
two 21-day incubation periods—untilofficials can declare the outbreak over. Since
August 2018, at least 3310 people have
been infected with Ebola and 2130 have died.
Attacks on treatment centers have killed
another 11 health care workers and patients
and injured 86. Officials are watching
carefully for new infections—inaccessible,
war-torn areas could still see cases, and
some patients can transmit the virus months
after recovery. But WHO Director-General
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the
3 March announcement was a very welcome
gift on his 55th birthday.19992001 200320052007 2009 2011 2013 2015 20170500010,15,20,25,30,Ebb and flow of NIH NSF DOD DOE NASA USDA
U.S. training
A decade of flat budgets
caused the number of
graduate students funded
by the National Institutes
of Health (NIH) to dip
below the total for the
much smaller National
Science Foundation. But
NIH is likely to regain its
lead thanks to a string
of healthy increases that
began in 2016.BIOMEDICINE‘London patient,’ still
HIV-free, goes public
A
40-year-old former chef, Adam Castillejo,
revealed this week that he is the “London
patient,” the second person in the world
that physicians believe has been cured of an
HIV infection. “I want to be an ambassador
of hope,” he told The New York Times. Castillejo’s
doctor first described his case last year at an
HIV/AIDS conference and in a Nature p a p e r.
At that point, no HIV had been detected in
Castillejo’s blood for 18 months after a stem cell
transplant to treat a life-threatening blood cancer,
but his doctor was reluctant to call him cured.
A similar transplant, with bloodmaking stem
cells bearing a mutation that made them
resistantto HIV, led to the 2007 cure of Timothy
Ray Brown, known as the “Berlin patient.” That
Castillejo remains HIV-free “suggests that the
Berlin patient is not a one-off case,” says stem cell
researcher Deng Hongkui of Peking University,
whose group has tried—so far unsuccessfully—to
mimic the resistant mutation in donor stem cells
using the genome editor CRISPR. For now, this
cure isn’t widely applicable because excellent HIV
drugs exist and stem cell transplants have seri-
ous side effects that restrict their use to people
with other serious conditions.13 MARCH 2020 • VOL 367 ISSUE 6483 1173
Published by AAAS