Are nitrogen and carbon cycle processes impacted by common stream antibiotics? A comparative assessment of single vs. mixture exposures

A variety of antibiotics are ubiquitous in all freshwater ecosystems that receive wastewater. A wide variety of antibiotics have been developed to kill problematic bacteria and fungi through targeted application, and their use has contributed significantly to public health and livestock management. Unfortunately, a substantial fraction of the antibiotics applied to humans, pets and livestock end up in wastewater, and ultimately many of these chemicals enter freshwater ecosystems. The effect of adding chemicals that are intentionally designed to kill microbes, on freshwater microbial communities remains poorly understood. There are reasons to be concerned, as microbes play an essential role in nutrient uptake, carbon fixation and denitrification in freshwater ecosystems. Chemicals that reduce or alter freshwater microbial communities might reduce their capacity to degrade the excess nutrients and organic matter that characterize wastewater. We performed a laboratory experiment in which we exposed microbial community from unexposed stream sediments to three commonly detected antibiotics found in urban wastewater and urban streams (sulfamethoxazole, danofloxacin, and erythromycin). We assessed how the form and concentration of inorganic nitrogen, microbial carbon, and nitrogen cycling processes changed in response to environmentally relevant doses (10 μg/L) of each of these antibiotics individually and in combination. We expected to find that all antibiotics suppressed rates of microbial mineralization and nitrogen transformations and we anticipated that this suppression of microbial activity would be greatest in the combined treatment. Contrary to our expectations we measured few significant changes in microbially mediated functions in response to our experimental antibiotic dosing. We found no difference in functional gene abundance of key nitrogen cycling genes nosZ, mcrA, nirK, and amoA genes, and we measured no treatment effects on NO3- uptake or N2O, N2, CH4, CO2 production over the course of our seven-day experiment. In the mixture treatment, we measured significant increases in NH4+ concentrations over the first 24 hours of the experiment, which were indistinguishable from controls within six hours. Our results suggest remarkable community resistance to pressure antibiotic exposure poses on naïve stream sediments.

The News of the Covid-19 Vaccine in the Media and Public Resistance in Indonesia: A Study of Islamic Law

This article aims to examine media coverage of COVID-19 and the resistance of the Indonesian people. This research is a legal sociology study that discusses the public's response to government policies regarding the Covid-19 vaccine with an Islamic legal approach. The data is analyzed using critical discourse analysis. This study concludes that community resistance to vaccines has a relationship with online media content. News content of victims who died after the vaccine, information about vaccines that impact the human body to become sick in the long term, and information about raw materials or contents of the Covid-19 vaccine that are not halal, indirectly have implications for the community resistance. This refusal was mainly due to information about victims who had been vaccinated experienced vaccine failures, especially from social media such as YouTube, WhatsApp, and Facebook, which are sometimes difficult to justify. According to Islamic law, people should be careful about content and news regarding Covid-19 because it may not be accurate. Therefore, the government needs to provide solutions in various ways. First, the government oversees all social media in conveying information so that all news related to the COVID-19 vaccine needs to be more careful and wisely not to worry the public. Second, the government needs to re-strengthen media regulations or news coverage that doesn’t seem to work optimally. Moreover, the government's vaccine policy aims to prevent the danger of the virus, which guarantees the safety of people's lives, and it is part of maqâshid al-syarī'ah. Likewise, the government has involved the MUI, which has authority in the field of religious fatwas, so that the certainty that the vaccine is halal can be accounted for in Islamic law.

Struggle of Vested-Interests on Type-C Mining Digging in Sebudi Village, Karangasem Bali

The application of regional autonomy in accordance with Article 10 of Law no. 22 of 1999 gave local governments the authority to manage natural resources, especially excavation C mining. The management of mineral C excavation in Sebudi Village will certainly have a positive impact and a negative impact on the community. The problems that then arise are that miners often violate the rules, causing damage that has an impact on the surrounding community, causing conflicts between corporations (miners) and the community. The purpose of this study was to determine the conflict and community resistance to the type-C excavation in Sebudi Village. This study uses interpretative qualitative methods through interviews, observations, and document studies. The results of this study indicate that there has been an internal conflict between the community and the miners. The conflict emphasizes the existence of unclear land tenure rights. This lack of clarity triggers small-scale disintegration triggered by the struggle for inheritance over land ownership which causes family ties to become more tenuous, resulting in mutual claims. The existence of mutual land ownership claims between families has an impact on the lack of clarity in the accountability of the land according to its rights and obligations (land certificates), thus causing uncertainty in paying taxes to the state or government. The absence of a land certificate is also one of the obstacles in managing the type-C excavation business permit which must be based on a land certificate.

Severe disturbance overflows the stabilizing buffer of variable biotic interactions

Recent studies have uncovered that biotic interaction strength varies over time in real ecosystems intrinsically and/or responding to anthropogenic disturbances. Little is known, however, about whether such interaction variability strengthens or weakens community resistance against disturbances. Here, we examine how the change in interaction strength after pesticide application mediates disturbance impacts on a freshwater community using outdoor mesocosms. We show that the change in interaction strength buffered the disturbance impact but amplified it once the disturbance severity exceeded a certain threshold. Importantly, we also show that interactions fluctuating more temporally under no disturbances were more changeable in response to pesticide applications. Our findings suggest that a severe disturbance may have a surprise impact on a biological community amplified by their own interaction variability, but the possibility still remains that we can predict the consequences of the disturbance by measuring the interaction variability before the disturbance occurs.

Undoing disaster colonialism: a pilot map of the pandemic's first wave in the Mapuche territories of Southern Chile

PurposeThe authors use media research and crowdsourced mapping to document how the first wave of the pandemic (April–August 2020) affected the Mapuche, focussing on seven categories of events: territorial control, spiritual defence, food sovereignty, traditional health practices, political violence, territorial needs and solidarity, and extractivist expansion.Design/methodology/approachResearch on the effects of the pandemic on the Mapuche and their territories is lacking; the few existing studies focus on death and infection rates but overlook how the pandemic interacts with ongoing processes of extractivism, state violence and community resistance. The authors’ pilot study addresses this gap through a map developed collaboratively by disaster scholars and Mapuche journalists.FindingsThe map provides a spatial and chronological overview of this period, highlighting the interconnections between the pandemic and neocolonialism. As examples, the authors focus on two phenomena: the creation of “health barriers” to ensure local territorial control and the state-supported expansion of extractive industries during the first months of the lockdown.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors intersperse our account of the project with reflections on its limitations and, specifically, on how colonial formations shape the research. Decolonising disaster studies and disaster risk reduction practice, the authors argue, is an ongoing process, bound to be flawed and incomplete but nevertheless an urgent pursuit.Originality/valueIn making this argument, the paper responds to the Disaster Studies Manifesto that inspires this special issue, taking up its invitation to scholars to be more reflexive about their research practice and to frame their investigations through grounded perspectives.

POLARISASI BERITA BOHONG COVID-19 : VIKTIMISASI KOLEKTIF

COVID-19 has changed the structural behavior of the world community, including the increasing spread of hoax. The massive spread of hoaxes and the abundance of available information has confused the community in indicating which information is correct or hoax. This paper uses a qualitative method with an analytical-descriptive approach. The author emphasizes the aspect of in-depth understanding of a problem by reviewing and analyzing scientific works and various scientific literature. The central factors of this research are facts related to the COVID-19 fake news and the identification of the impact of the spread of the false news. The study found that the huge number of hoaxes related to COVID-19 caused collective victimization, namely the community. Unclear information results in civil resilience. This resilience raised the community resistance regarding government policies in minimizing the impact of COVID-19 on public health in general.

The role of evolutionary modes for trait-based cascades in mutualistic networks

The erosion of functional diversity may foster the collapse of ecological systems. Functional diversity is ultimately defined by the distribution of species traits and, as species traits are a legacy of species evolutionary history, one might expect that the mode of trait evolution influence community resistance under the loss of functional diversity. In this paper, we investigate the role of trait evolutionary dynamics on the robustness of mutualistic networks undergoing the following scenarios of species loss: i) random extinctions, ii) loss of functional distinctiveness and iii) biased towards larger trait values. We simulated networks defined by models of single trait complementary and evolutionary modes where traits can arise in recent diversification events with weak phylogenetic signal, in early diversification events with strong phylogenetic signal, or as a random walk through evolutionary time. Our simulations show that mutualistic networks are especially vulnerable to extinctions based on trait distinctiveness and more robust to random extinction dynamics. The networks show intermediate level of robustness against size-based extinctions. Despite the small range of variation in network robustness, our results show that the mode of trait evolution matters for network robustness in all three scenarios. Networks with low phylogenetic signal are more robust than networks with high phylogenetic signal across all scenarios. As a consequence, our results predict that mutualistic networks based upon current adaptations are more likely to cope with extinction dynamics than those networks that are based upon conserved traits.

Antimicrobial Resistance Situational Analysis 2019–2020: Design and Performance for Human Health Surveillance in Uganda

Antibiotic resistance and its mechanisms have been known for over six decades, but global efforts to characterize its routine drivers have only gained momentum in the recent past. Drivers of clinical and community resistance go beyond just clinical practice, which is why one-health approaches offer the most realistic option for controlling antibiotic resistance. It is noteworthy that emergence of resistance occurs naturally in the environment, but akin to climate change, the current accelerated emergence and spread bears hallmarks of anthropomorphic influence. If left unchecked, this has the potential to undo medical and agricultural advancements of the last century. To tackle this problem, the WHO recommends that nations develop, adopt and implement strategies that track the changing trends in antibiotic resistance levels. In this article, we examine efforts and progress in developing and implementing a human health antimicrobial resistance surveillance strategy in Uganda. We do so within context of the National Action Plan for tackling antimicrobial resistance (AMR-NAP) launched in 2018. We discuss the technical milestones and progress in implementing surveillance of GLASS priority pathogens under this framework. The preliminary output of the framework is used to examine the performance as well as compare AMR and AMU surveillance data to explain observed trends. We conclude that Uganda is making progress in developing and implementing a functional AMR surveillance strategy for human health.