Category: environment

Paris Is Plotting a Greener, Slower Beltway

Paris beltway imagined new
A rendering of the reimagined Paris beltway. (Credit: Céline Orsingher)

Mayor Anne Hidalgo’s reelection manifesto calls for a green revamp of the Boulevard Périphérique, the city’s car-clogged inner ring urban highway.

By Feargus O’Sullivan

Like so many cities, Paris is girdled by beltways — several of them, in fact. The innermost and most notorious one is known as the Boulevard Périphérique,  a 22-mile-long ring road completed in 1973 and built in part upon the footprint of the city’s historic walls. The traffic-clogged urban highway plays a major role in Parisian mobility, but it’s also a prime contributor of pollution, both atmospheric and aural, as well as an all-but-impassable barrier severing the historic city from its inner suburbs. Last year, Paris deputies proposed downsizing the Périphérique, removing vehicle lanes and dropping speed limits to transform the road from a smog-spewing limited-access highway into a tree-lined “metropolitan avenue.”

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Chloroquine: les critiques contre l’étude du “Lancet” sont-elles fondées?

LA VÉRIFICATION – Le professeur Philippe Parola, bras droit de Didier Raoult, l’a qualifiée de «farce». Au-delà, de nombreux scientifiques s’interrogent sur l’origine des données qui concluent à un excès de mortalité avec l’antipaludéen [. . .]

Continue at Source: Chloroquine: les critiques contre l’étude du «Lancet» sont-elles fondées?

France bans use of hydroxychloroquine, drug touted by Trump, to treat coronavirus

Hydroxychloroquine had been approved for use in seriously ill patients, but the latest large-scale research shows it could do more harm than good.

Paris — France has banned the use of the controversial anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine to treat people with COVID-19, the diseased caused by the new coronavirus. The move follows the publication of initial findings from a large-scale study that found the drug offered no benefit to patients, and could in fact be harmful.

The Lancet medical journal reported on May 22 that the observational study on nearly 100,000 patients from multiple countries found a higher mortality rate and an increased frequency of irregular heartbeats in patients who were given hydroxychloroquine.

France’s health minister responded to the findings the next day by asking the French High Council for Public Health (HCSP) to review the situation, and it recommended halting the use of the drug

Source: France bans use of hydroxychloroquine, drug touted by Trump, to treat coronavirus – CBS News

Coronavirus found in Paris sewage points to early warning system 

Rising levels of SARS-CoV-2 detected in wastewater before corresponding spike in clinical cases

By sampling sewage across greater Paris for more than 1 month, researchers have detected a rise and fall in novel coronavirus concentrations that correspond to the shape of the COVID-19 outbreak in the region, where a lockdown is now suppressing spread of the disease. Although several research groups have reported detecting coronavirus in wastewater, the researchers say the new study is the first to show that the technique can pick up a sharp rise in viral concentrations in sewage before cases explode in the clinic. That points to its potential as a cheap, noninvasive tool to warn against outbreaks, they say.

“This visibility is also going to help us predict a second wave of outbreaks,” says Sébastien Wurtzer, a virologist at Eau de Paris, the city’s public water utility. Wurtzer and his colleagues posted the study, which has not been peer-reviewed, on the preprint repository medRxiv on 17 April. [ . . ]

Continue at SCIENCE: Coronavirus found in Paris sewage points to early warning system | Science | AAAS