EU pesticide ban 'will harm malaria control'

ENN, March 26, 2009

Hopes of overturning a European Union (EU) pesticides ban that scientists believe could hamper malaria control in developing countries have been dashed.
The United Kingdom said last week that it had failed to get support from other EU countries for an assessment of the impact of removing a range of pesticides from use.
More than 160 leading public health scientists signed a petition against the ban before the European Parliament voted in favour of restrictions on the pesticides in January, by 557 votes to 61.

Should the 27 governments of the EU states ratify the decision at an agriculture ministers' meeting expected to take place in May or June this year, the ban would come into effect from 2014. Read more...

Conservationists deciding which species to survive

New Scietist, March 08, 2009

WOULD the animal have made it into the ark? That's the kind of question conservationists have been asking when it comes to the thorny issue of picking which threatened species to save.
Kerstin Zander of the Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia, and her colleagues looked at conserving cattle - the species with the most number of breeds to have gone extinct. They turned to an approach first outlined by economist Martin Weitzman at Harvard University. In the 1990s, Weitzman devised a formula for prioritising species for conservation. This considers the cost of saving a species, how useful or genetically diverse it is, and the increase in its chance of survival if chosen. Read more...