Food waste is not just a problem for restaurants — airports also have to deal with piles of this kind of garbage.

At one of the nation’s busiest airports, Charlotte Douglas International in North Carolina, each passenger generates half a pound of garbage on average per visit. But instead of just sending all that trash to the landfill, Charlotte has taken a different approach. It’s the first airport to put worms to work dealing with trash.

Yes, worms.

Before the worms get a whack at the airport waste, there’s some human work required. Twenty-five tons of trash a day tumbles onto a conveyor belt under the supervision of Charlotte Airport housekeeping manager Bob Lucas.

“You see it coming down off the cascade up there,” Lucas says. “What that does is, it gives it like a waterfall effect. So it spreads it out on the belt a little bit more.”

A dozen employees pluck out recyclables and sort through aluminum, plastic and more, so passengers don’t have to do the sorting in the terminal.

In the four months since this operation got under way, trash going from the Charlotte airport to the landfill is down an impressive 70 percent. Recyclables are crushed, baled and sold for cash. There are shirts sorted and laundered and donated, and plastic cups collected. (The shirts come from people who toss clothing when they suddenly discover their suitcases are too heavy.)

The organic stuff — waste from airport restaurants, food scraps off planes, and the half-eaten Cinnabon that a traveler has tossed out — mixes in a big tank for a few days to start the composting process. Then it’s time for the stars of this show to take over.

“There’s the workers,” Lucas says, digging his fingers into the top layer of a 50-foot-long composting bin, “1.9 million of them.”

They are common backyard red wigglers, about 3 inches long, a quarter-inch around — and hungry. Lucas says they eat half their weight a day.

Organic waste ends up in a series of 50-foot beds where the worms do their work. Castings (aka worm poop) fall through a screen at the bottom of the bed and will be used as fertilizer on airport grounds. Enlarge image

Organic waste ends up in a series of 50-foot beds where the worms do their work. Castings (aka worm poop) fall through a screen at the bottom of the bed and will be used as fertilizer on airport grounds.

Julie Rose

“I have not heard of another airport that does that,” says Katherine Preston, environmental affairs director for Airports Council International-North America.

And that’s with good reason. First of all, recycling and worm composting take space many airports don’t have.

Plus, worms are finicky and — as Lucas recently learned — prone to crawling out en masse at times. That resulted in a panicked call to the guy who sold him the worms.

“First thing I told him: ‘They’re trying to leave.’ And he said, ‘Get a light and stick it under the bed.’ And they just turn around and go back in and they’re happy,” Lucas says.

Light on. Crisis averted. If Lucas can keep the worms happy, they’ll soon be producing enough worm poop to fertilize all of the airport’s flower beds and shrubs, Lucas says.

Worm poop. Go ahead and giggle. Charlotte officials sure did as they debated the $1.2 million it cost to launch the program. But they’re not laughing now: The airport expects to be making money off its trash in five years.

via One Airport’s Trash Is 2 Million Worms’ Treasure : The Salt : NPR.

Global efforts to combat malaria are under threat from new strains of drug-resistant malaria, which are cropping up in Southeast Asia.

Over the last decade, the number of malaria deaths around the world has dropped sharply, from just over 1 million in 2000 to roughly 600,000 last year.

Much of that progress is due to the widespread use of drugs containing artemisinin. The new malaria drugs quickly kill the parasite.

But in Southeast Asia doctors are starting to see cracks in artemisinin’s armor. The drugs are working more slowly, and sometimes they’re failing to wipe out the malaria parasite entirely.

This 5-year-old boy was carried to a Thai malaria clinic by his mother from deep inside Myanmar. If the mother had waited even a day longer, doctors say, the child probably would have died.

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A second promo image for the malaria animation post.

Shots – Health News

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The World Health Organization reported Monday that artemisinin resistance has now been detected in four countries: Cambodia, Myanmar (also known as Burma), Thailand and Vietnam.

Although the resistance is still limited to Southeast Asia, WHO officials worry that it could spill out of the region.

Two hot spots for artemisinin resistance are in Thailand’s thickly forested border regions. One is along Thailand’s eastern border with Cambodia, and the other is on the country’s western boundary with Myanmar.

If artemisinin-based treatments become ineffective in Africa — where malaria remains the leading killer of children under the age of 5 — it could be disastrous. Doctors say they have few other powerful drugs to use against the disease.

Global funding for the fight against malaria rose to $1.71 billion in 2010, or nearly twentyfold since 2000. But it has plateaued in the past few years, the WHO said. Many malaria interventions, like distribution of bed nets and insecticide spraying have also leveled off during this time, the report found.

via A View From The Ground: Thailand Confronts Drug-Resistant Malaria : Shots – Health News : NPR.

When it comes to predicting whether someone will have Alzheimer’s disease, newfangled diagnostic tests for the illness aren’t as good as old-fashioned quizzes of thinking and memory.

That’s the word from a study that compared different methods for identifying Alzheimer’s. The results was just published in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

Scientists have been looking for a scan or lab test, such as changes in particular proteins in the blood, to simplify and speed up the detection of Alzheimer’s. The goal is to be able to identify people at risk of the illness long before symptoms such as impaired thinking surface. But that goal is far from being realized.

In this study, researchers compared how well biological and cognitive tests did at identifying whether people who already had mild cognitive impairment would go on to develop Alzheimer’s. They found that two tests measuring verbal memory were the best at predicting whether someone would develop Alzheimer’s in the next two years.

In those tests, people were read a story or a list of words, and then asked to recall the information 30 minutes later. In people who are progressing to Alzheimer’s, "there’s forgetting," neuroscientist Terry Goldberg, a co-author of the study, told Shots. "There’s an increased rate of forgetting."

One biological marker, a brain scan that measured changes in the thickness of the middle temporal lobe, also predicted people who went on to have Alzheimer’s. Other biological markers, such as tests for telltale proteins in blood and cerebrospinal fluid, also revealed changes, but not as well. Those tests have been used in research laboratories, but aren’t being used to test for Alzheimer’s in clinical practice.

"It’s not that the biomarkers didn’t work," says Goldberg, a professor at Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine in Manhasset, N.Y. "But when you compared them head to head, you find that the cognitive markers are the most robust."

That means that the thinking tests can also be used for guides in designing therapies. In fact, Goldberg says, they may ultimately be more useful that the biological tests. "What you want to change is how people do in everyday life," he says.

The trick is to diagnose mild cognitive impairment, a stage between normal forgetfulness and serious cognitive problems. It sometimes leads to Alzheimer’s, but can be caused by other diseases, too. People with MCI can be more forgetful, have trouble multitasking, and take longer to remember or decide. This study looked at 116 people with MCI who were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in two years, 204 people with MCI who didn’t get Alzheimer’s and 197 healthy people as controls.

The study used information from the Alzheimer’s Disease NeuroImaging Initiative, which is looking for ways to identify risk factors for Alzheimer’s, and techniques for early diagnosis.

The goal would then be to create treatments that could profoundly slow or even halt the disease’s process. No such treatments exist now. Earlier this year, the National Institute on Aging redefined Alzheimer’s, broadening the definition and including the fact that biomarkers can be used for early detection. But since there is no treatment that slows or halts the disease, those biomarker tests don’t help patients or families manage the disease.

via Memory Quizzes Still Best For Alzheimer's Diagnosis : Shots – Health News : NPR.