People wearing face masks following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak are seen near the lit-up Olympic rings at top of the Olympic Tower, a year ahead of the opening of the 2022 Winter Olympic Games, in Beijing, China February 4, 2021. REUTERS/Tingshu Wang/File Photo

Beijings hosting of the 2022 Winter Olympics offers concerned nations the chance to press China on its human rights record, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Friday.

Trudeau said China would only change its behavior if faced with a united front, adding he would raise the matter at a Group of Seven leaders' summit next week.

"The pressure on China right now from the international community ... is significantly acute, particularly with the Winter Olympics coming up in China next year," Trudeau told the Toronto Star in a video interview.

"It would be easy for China ... to shrug off what any one country, including just the United States alone, says. But when the global community comes together, that starts to shape their own calculations."

Canada, locked in a major diplomatic and trade dispute with China for more than two years, is one of the world's leading winter sports nations.

Trudeau did not raise the question of athletes staying away from the Games. The Canadian Olympic Committee opposes a boycott, saying it would not force a change to Chinas human rights record.

U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month called for a U.S. diplomatic boycott of the Games next year, citing the State Departments conclusion that a genocide of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities is taking place in China.

Canada's parliament passed a nonbinding motion in February saying China's treatment of the Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region constitutes genocide. read more

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Human Behavior

Column: Coming together to overcome loneliness and isolation – The Salem News

June 5, 2021 medical

Call your grandparent, visit an elderly neighbor, volunteer at your local senior center, enlist older individuals to join your workforce as expertsand -- most importantly -- dont forget how lonely, isolated and disconnected you felt this past year.

Humans crave connection. We develop from cells connected to another person. We are born into a world full of people and we thrive when we are held, touched, caressed, fed and loved. Somehow, as we grow older, our craving for connection changes. Toddlers rant and shout get away, teenagers duck the hug from a parent and adults move from hugs to handshakes. This past year has been a lesson and awakening to many about our primal need for connection.

Unforgettable may be the word to describe this pandemic year. However, as a psychologist, I understand how human behavior will propel us in another direction. We will remember the losses, the quarantineand the home schooling but time will soften the edges of those negative memories and some will fade completely as we begin to socialize, hug our friends and go back to a way of living that is happily familiar. Most individuals will move forward in their life slowly and steadily but others may struggle to do so because before the pandemic; there was already an invisible epidemic that unfortunately may continue to go unseen -- loneliness.

If you are someone who was spared from the detrimental impact of the physical and social disconnection during this past year, you are lucky. Most of us experienced some form of disconnection and felt the loss. However, many of us had resources, skills and needed technology to adapt and find a new way to connect. We started zooming dinner parties, telephoning old college friends and hosting work happy hours and virtual game nights. Some of us even podded with other individuals/families/groups to reduce some of the consequences we were experiencing from the required restrictions placed upon us. As we go back to our lives, remember that our communities are filled with people that have and will continue to suffer from the impact of physical and social disconnection.

An especially hard hit group during and before the pandemic are older adults and the elderly. Loneliness and disconnection or feelings of isolation can create a mental health crisis in individuals. Research has detailed health consequences that include premature mortality.

Lacking social connection carries a risk that is comparable, and in many cases, exceeds that of other well-accepted risk factors, including smoking up to 15 cigarettes per day, obesity, physical inactivity, and air pollution (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010). This research article, titled, Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review, was published back in 2010 and indicates that social connection has a direct impact on not only mental health but also physical health.

In a more recent 2017 article, J. Lubben states, Strong social relationships are essential for a good life. The consequences of neglecting this fact become especially apparent in old age. Thus it is urgent that more attention be given to social isolation as a potent killer.

Human beings need connection for their physical and emotional well-being. We are created to connect and be connected with others. Social connection is a protective factor to cognitive decline, heart disease, depression and much more.

Social connection does not equal company. Loneliness can occur even when people are among others. You can be alone and not feel lonely and vice versa. With a growing adult population who are increasingly living alone, the risk of loneliness is growing larger and the impact to our communities greater.

A task force, Salem for all Ages, was created to support the work of the World Health Organization and AARPs sponsored campaign to combat loneliness. When the task force was first established five years ago, isolation was the top item respondents listed as an issue on a survey. In Salem, North Shore Community Health Center partnered with the Council on Aging prior to the pandemic to provide counseling to older adults. When everything shut down, individuals were reluctant to have virtual counseling. Thankfully, this has changed recently and North Shore Community Health behavioral health clinicians are using the Community Life Center to provide counseling to those 55 and older in the community.

While the pandemic has created widespread misfortune one positive outcome may be the reduction in stigma surrounding mental health as well as an increase in access to individuals needing support.

If you are one of those individuals or someonewho wants to support an older adult here are some things that can mediate the risks associated with loneliness:

Reach out and connect. This can be volunteering, working for a social cause or purpose, or joining a group that shares a like or hobby.

Check in on older adults in your community: neighbors, relatives, the person you see every week sitting alone in the coffee shop.

Furry interactions offer great benefits. Visit a dog park. If you are a relative of an older adult and have a pet, bring them along on your visit.

If you are feeling lonely or believe loneliness is impacting a loved one, reach out for help. Contact their primary care physician, their religious or spiritual leader, a counselor or other family members to make a plan and take action.

Dr. Angela Parente is a clinical psychologist and the director of behavioral health at North Shore Community Health Center. She is also the primary caretaker of her 94-yeat-old aunt who enjoys weekly visits with Chiara the cat. This column was produced in cooperation with the Salem for All Ages Task Force.

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Human Behavior

Bad bear behavior in the Smokies is most often caused by people – WBIR.com

June 5, 2021 medical

Despite signs reminding visitors not to feed or get close to animals, there are always those who break the rules. Experts are teaching bears to avoid humans.

GATLINBURG, Tenn. In the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, there are millions of visitors each year. Many of them are looking for a chance to see a bear, but most are oblivious to a phrase often repeated in the Smokies: "A fed bear is a dead bear."

"Bears are a novelty," wildlife technician Ryan Williamson said. "A lot of people come to this area to see bears and to view bears."

NPS said human/bear interactions typically peak around late-May or June. Despite numerous signs reminding visitors not to feed or get too close to the wildlife, there are always those who break the rules.

"It's a really simple message that people have a really hard time following," Williamson said. "They think that by feeding them or getting them close that they're doing the bear a favor... the bear usually loses when it comes to that scenario."

If people won't listen, the park hopes bears will. Wildlife experts use a variety of adverse conditioning techniques for their own safety.

"We really try to maintain that sense of fear that bears naturally have for people," Williamson said. "When bear start showing up around humans, their lifespan's cut in half."

Those techniques include shooting them with paintballs, creating loud noises and setting off firecrackers to discourage them from going too close the road or in areas that people like to congregate.

They also sweep picnic areas and campgrounds to make sure bears won't find any leftover food.

"Once a bear learns to do something one time, it learns that behavior," Williamson said. "We never want them to get that one opportunity."

Those strategies don't always work, which is why the park also uses ear tags to track the bears and their behavior.

"There's many bears in this park that have been handled almost 10 times and released on site," Williamson said. "That's just because every year or so they just need a reminder that people are bad for them."

Every year, the park anesthetizes and ear tags between 50 and 70 bears. Of those, only about 10 are relocated.

"The preference is once we handle a bear, we never want to handle that bear again," Williamson said. "We prefer them to live naturally and do what bears normally do."

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Human Behavior

The Anatomy of a Great Pitch | Inc.com – Inc.com

June 5, 2021 medical

In an elevator pitch, you have approximately 60seconds to get the recipient's attention. With an email pitch, even if you get someone to open your email, you have just 30. Here's what you need to include in those precious few seconds.

Research for attention

Attention is a scarce, expensive currency nowadays. Not everything grabs our attention anymore--what really hooks usare only those things that speak to our interest and appeal to our style/tone.

Researching what the other side thinks and likes, and how they speak, is crucial to your pitch being successful. When pitching a business, learn its pain and goals. If you're pitching a VC firm, use the same language that businesses in your niche used during a successful funding round. Above all, study the voice of the customer. It's what keeps any business running, both B2B and B2C. In the end, it's really B2P -- business to people -- and each target audience is different.

I asked Drayton Bird, former vice chairman and global creative director at Ogilvy how he successfully pitched Bentley. His response:

I worked with more than eight brands in the car business, and everyone I knew started out by selling cars. So, I just asked Bentley if the language they use when selling a car to a prospect is the same language used in the meeting with me today.

They said yes, and I suggested that's the tone we should use in your copy, and that got me the business. I won Bentley by asking a question I already knew the answer to because I've done my research.

Be clear

A clear message will always triumph over a complex pitch filled with jargon.

Skill to work on: Communication

Communication is fundamental because the next three skills will have less impact without it.Warren Buffett said it best: "If you can't communicate, it's like winking at a girl in the dark, nothing happens."

Benefits alone (emotions like relief, status, or desire) can get the job done most of the time, as people buy (and accept pitches) for two reasons: to move away from pain, or get closer to desire. As humans, we justify emotional decisions with logic, and in general, emotions are stronger than logic in behavioral economics.

Pitching a content strategy promising great writing is a feature. The same pitch focusing on promising the buyer they'll become an authority in their space is a desire-driven-benefit (status).

Focus on selling the benefits, not the features, to increase desire. Also, to increase connection between seller and buyer in your pitches, use personal language like "you" and "you're,"and avoid "I" and "we" as much as possible.

Skill to work on: Psychology

Educating yourself on human behavior, consumer psychology, and behavioral economics will maximize your ability to influence, persuade, and pitch successfully.

Here are three books that helped me:

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Influence by Robert Cialdini

Emotion will help drive prospects to allocate mental bandwidth into calculating the deal logically.But logic is necessary for an air-tight pitch. You sell certainty in an uncertain world. People don't necessarily accept the best pitches. They say yes to those they deem least risky.

People buy from people. You're pitching (selling) an idea, but what you're truly selling is "yourself."Even if the proposition is great, the pitch won't sell if the seller isn't trusted.To bypass the logical barrier, present a pitch with strong case studies, proven business models, and social proof like:

Celebrity endorsements

Media coverage

Loan approvals

Testimonials

LOI letters

Skill to work on: Sales

It shouldn't surprise you that the number one job billionaires and multimillionaires held before they accumulated wealth is in sales.

I've held a commission-only sales job for three years in my mid-20s, and I attest that it's the single most important skill I learned -- and it directly affected my copywriting business pitches.

Skill to work on: Negotiation

Improving this skill will make your pitches better, both verbally and in a written format. I recommend the book Getting to Yesby William Uri, and the wonderful Harvard Program On Negotiation.

Communication, sales, negotiation, and psychology are four pillars that helped me better implement attention, clarity, emotion, and logic in my pitches - landing nine-figure clients through cold emails and over Zoom. Use these tips to land your next big contract.

The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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The Anatomy of a Great Pitch | Inc.com - Inc.com

Human Behavior

Bear Sightings In CT On The Rise: Town-By-Town Updates – Patch.com

June 5, 2021 medical

CONNECTICUT Black bears can be found throughout the state, and their population is on the rise, according to the latest data released by the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.

"That means there is going to be more encounters between bears and humans, and those encounters can take many forms," said DEEP wildlife biologist Paul Rego.

Those can range from spying one from a distance during a nature walk to hitting one on a highway through having one break into your home looking for breakfast.

Residents interested in minimizing the number of those last kinds of encounters would do well to stow their bird feeders, according to Rego. Not only do they attract bears, but reward them for coming close to your home. That same guidance applies to trash cans that aren't tightly covered.

It's not that the bears have become hungrier or more desperate, it's just that they have become more habituated to man-made structures and human behavior.

"Almost all of a bear's life revolves around food," Rego said. "So when they break into a home it means they have overcome any fear of humans."

On those infrequent but memorable occasions when you encounter a bear in your kitchen, Rego says the important thing to remember is to not corner it.

"Often once a bear detects a human inside the home, it will try to leave, most often through the same route that it entered." So, make sure you're not in the way.

It's less rare to find a bear along your hiking trail. Now that hiking season is in full throttle, Rego recommends you start making some noise, and maybe bring a noisy group along for the romp.

"The most dangerous thing you can do involving bears is to surprise one," the biologist said.

The second, related, rule is to keep your dog on a leash. Bears "generally have no interest in pursuing humans as meals," but they'll happily break a sweat for your off-leash dog. When your canine friend inevitably leads the bear back to you, everybody gets caught off-guard by the surprise, and nobody has a good day.

If you're camping, it's important to keep a clean campsite, and make sure the food is not available to bears. Some campgrounds provide a big metal "bear box," Rego said. Otherwise, he recommends storing the burger patties and s'mores fixings in your car.

Connecticut is currently at the height of bear activity. Late May to early July is their breeding season, and the time of year that young bears born 18 months earlier start flexing on their own. DEEP will receive relatively few reports of sightings from December to March. Outside of those times, the state is Bear World, and humans just live in it.

"They come out of winter hibernation and start getting active as early as March, and most are out of hibernation by late April, and then they're wandering around looking for food," Rego told Patch.

See Also: Bobcat Sightings In CT Rise: Town-By-Town Updates

The DEEP biologists have a good handle on our ursine neighbors' comings and goings because they have been studying their habits for decades. Each year technicians will tag the ears of the beasts with a different color code (we're currently in the "pink" season) and track the animals' migration.

The system also allows DEEP to keep an eye on the troublemakers, or as Rego more politely phrased it, "identify a bear that is involved in repeat conflicts."

Ten years ago, DEEP was able to identify a bear as one who "had taken a liking to killing goats and sheep," Rego said. Their tracking system informed the biologists that it was just one bad bear going on a tear, and not a new trend of the whole population.

If you need to protect your goats and sheep from bear clutches, Rego says electric fencing, "one with pretty good power to it," is the way to go. Anything else won't cut it.

"An 8-foot chain link fence with barbed wire stretched across the top is nothing for a bear to climb up and go over,"the wildlife expert said.

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Human Behavior

Social Anxiety and Work – Harvard Business Review

June 5, 2021 medical

June 01, 2021

The Covid-19 pandemic changed how many of us interact and feel about people. Some of us experienced more social anxiety in the past year and may be feeling it even now, in the aftermath of the pandemic.

How do we listen to ourselves and know when to address our social anxiety, especially when it comes into play with colleagues? Host Morra Aarons-Mele speaks with Stefan Hofmann, a clinical psychologist at Boston University about social anxietys deep roots in natural human behavior and how we can address it now.

HBR Presents is a network of podcasts curated by HBR editors, bringing you the best business ideas from the leading minds in management. The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harvard Business Review or its affiliates.

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Human Behavior

Janie Funk | Nevada Center for Excellence in Disabilities | College of Education and Human Development – Nevada Today

June 5, 2021 medical

Janie Funk serves as a Licensed Behavior Analyst for the Positive Behavior Support of Nevada System of Care Project.

Funk has provided behavior-analytic services in Northern Nevada since 2012.She became a Board-Certified Behavior Analyst in 2016, graduated from NvLEND in 2017, andearned her doctoral degree in 2020 from the University of Nevada, Reno. Her clinical expertise includes providing assessment, direct services, and consultation for families and caretakers of children and adults with developmental and intellectual disabilities with co-occurring mental health disorders. She also has experience with statewide program evaluation and developing behavioral services policies for state agencies.

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Janie Funk | Nevada Center for Excellence in Disabilities | College of Education and Human Development - Nevada Today

Human Behavior

AI-Powered Test Automation: Embracing the Future of Software Testing – TechDecisions

June 5, 2021 medical

Last year, the global pandemic caused a major shift in how businesses operate, introducing new challenges of remote work and accelerated digital transformation at an unprecedented pace.

Organizations are now in a race against time to build high-quality software to propel their digital transformation initiatives forward. However, ensuring optimal software quality in a fast-paced, hyper-connected and complex world is not an easy task.

While traditional test automation has enabled test teams with a smarter and quicker means for delivering high software quality, AI-powered tools can drive its capabilities to the next level.

Traditional test automation delivers tools to control test execution and compare test results against expected outcomes.

While such tools can test and deliver results automatically, they still need human supervision. Without human supervision, traditional test automation tools cant identify which tests to run, so they end up running every test or a predetermined set of tests.

When powered by AI, a test automation tool can review the current test status, recent code changes, code coverage and other associated metrics to intelligently decide which tests to run and then trigger them automatically.

Read: How Intelligent Automation is Changing Global Business

AI enables test automation to move beyond its scope of simple rule-based automation. It utilizes AI algorithms to efficiently train systems using large data sets.

Through the application of reasoning, problem-solving and machine learning, an AI-powered test automation tool can mimic human behavior and reduce the direct involvement of software testers in mundane tasks.

AI is changing software testing in many ways. It is removing many limitations in traditional test automation and delivering more value to testers and developers alike.

It enables organizations to test faster and better while reducing costs and human dependencies. AI has imparted an incredible positive impact on most software testing use cases, including:

Unit TestingTesters can use RPA tools (an application of AI) to reduce flaky test cases while conducting unit testing. Such tools can also help with the maintenance of unit test scripts.API TestingAI-powered test automation tools can convert manual UI tests into automated API tests. This lowers the requirement of specialized testing skills for the process and enables organizations to build a more sustainable API testing strategy.

Read: You Need Predictive Analytics for Your Software Testing: Heres Why

UI TestingEnsures more accuracy in comparison to manual testing. It is hard to manually detect parameters such as GUI size difference and a combination of colors, which can be easily identified with AI.

Regression TestingEnables test teams to run the entire test suite in a timely manner on every change, however minor it may be. AI can prioritize and re-target regression tests to test high-risk areas with short run-times. Image-Based TestingVisual validations involved in image-based testing can be simplified with the ML capability of AI. Automated visual validation tools make image-based testing a breeze.

Like any new technology, there is a lot of hype around AI-powered software testing. The utilization of AI in various testing scenarios is delivering significant improvements and making intelligent test automation a reality. AI-powered test automation is helping organizations reimagine software testing and delivering real business benefits. Some of its key benefits for organizations include:

1. Auto-Generation of Test Scripts

AI-powered test automation helps teams with the auto-generation of test codes that perform all the required functions, such as click buttons, form fills, app logins and more.

There will be complex test cases for which AI-powered test automation tools cant generate code, but it can auto-generate more than 80% of the required code reliably, enhancing the productivity of testing teams significantly.

Furthermore, AI also helps with auto-maintenance to ensure continuous quality while reducing the burden on human testers.

2. Optimization of Testing Process

AI is the force behind the product recommendations on Amazon or the shows Netflix suggests. An AI-enabled recommendation engine allows marketers to provide relevant product recommendations to customers in real-time.

The same approach can be applied to simplify software testing. AI can suggest tests with the maximum probability of finding bugs, based on the risk information, removing the guesswork from testing and empowering teams to home in on the actual risk areas.

3. Measurement of Release Impact

AI-powered test automation tools can predict how an upcoming software release will impact end-users.By leveraging neural networks and analyzing test history and data from current test runs, the tool can predict whether customer satisfaction will move up or down. Equipped with such information, organizations can adjust likewise and ensure that their customers remain satisfied with the user experience.

4. Delivers a Competitive Edge

AI-powered test automation tools help organizations gain a competitive edge. Various AI capabilities such as ML and neural networks can be used to understand how various technical factors are impacting the user experience and business outcomes.

For example, AI can detect whether a new implementation is negatively impacting the load times and could lower conversion rates upon release.

By delivering predictions on how releases will affect the business, AI-powered tools empower organizations to make course corrections to have a positive impact.

5. Enables Productivity and Cost Gains

A recent study discovered that testers spend 17% of their time dealing with false positives and another 14% on additional test maintenance tasks. An AI-powered tool with its auto-generation and auto-maintenance capabilities can help test teams save valuable time and effort and put it toward tackling complex requirements.

It can also help organizations optimize testing costs by reducing human dependence on mundane testing tasks.

Its quite clear that AI-powered test automation is not a passing fad. Such tools are enabling organizations to understand and adapt better to ever-changing customer expectations. Rather than taking a wait-and-watch approach, its time to embrace the innovation that AI has unleashed in test automation.

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Human Behavior

40 years of AIDS taught us epidemiologic humility. We need to apply that lesson in fighting Covid-19 – STAT – STAT

June 5, 2021 medical

Forty years later, I can still recall my visceral reaction to reading an article in the June 5, 1981, issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), which opened with this sentence: In the period October 1980-May 1981, 5 young men, all active homosexuals, were treated for biopsy-confirmed Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia at 3 different hospitals in Los Angeles, California.

I was an infectious disease fellow at Harvard Medical School at the time, trying to keep abreast of epidemic trends from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, which published the weekly bulletin.

One of my first thoughts was that I couldnt believe the MMWR had actually referred to gay men, albeit in the purple prose of the era. It was completely unexpected, since I could not recall the bulletin or the CDC, for that matter ever having discussing sexual and gender minority people before. I was then volunteering once a week at the Fenway Community Health Center which, at the time, was a small neighborhood health clinic not far from Bostons Fenway Park used mostly by gay and bisexual men and transgender women. There, with only limited diagnostics and a fairly rudimentary therapeutic armamentarium, I treated the most challenging presentations of sexually transmitted infections, such as recurrent warts and ulcers.

When I read the MMWR report, which many herald as the first report of AIDS, I was struck with how the cases described were quite distinctive in that the clinical conditions differed between the men, yet their problems suggested they were severely immunosuppressed without any identifiable cause such as chemotherapy. As a nascent infectious disease specialist, I had a lot of questions, not least of which was how being gay was associated with becoming ill.

The subsequent weeks and months blurred into years of misinformation, false leads, and agonizing deaths. In the earliest days, competing hypotheses for the cause of what was then known as gay-related immune deficiency (GRID) were proposed. The burnout hypothesis suggested that the diversity of illnesses was not due to a single pathogen, but that people who had numerous sexual partners and/or who used many different kinds of drugs were overwhelming their immune systems. Researchers also focused on party drugs such as volatile nitrites (known as poppers), which produced a sense of euphoria and increased sexual pleasure, in an attempt to demonstrate that these drugs were particularly toxic to the immune system.

As reports emerged of individuals who had never used drugs and/or had few sex partners getting sick because they were sexual partners of individuals who became ill and died, researchers hypothesized that the disease was caused by a transmissible organism. The question then arose as to whether the microbe was a more virulent form of a common existing pathogen, such as ubiquitous herpes simplex, or if AIDS was caused by a new one. The lack of clarity about what was causing AIDS, and the lack of a diagnostic tool that could determine who was sick and who wasnt, fueled hysteria.

In the midst of this uncertainty, the silence of the Reagan administration was palpable, especially when compared to the attention given to the limited number of people who had become sick and died of Legionnaires disease or toxic shock syndrome, two other public epidemics from the 1980s. The implicit message from the administration was that because AIDS seemed to be confined to groups of individuals who didnt matter to society, the less said, the better.

Given what was then known about who was at greatest risk of AIDS and how they might have acquired the infection, people with AIDS also had to contend with high levels of stigma and discrimination. The press routinely referred to AIDS as the 4H disease because it affected Haitians, homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and heroin users.

One of the first patients with AIDS I took care of was a young college student who developed lesions of Kaposi sarcoma that covered his extremities and his face, made his lymph glands swell, and caused fevers, chills, and sweats. As he became sicker and frailer, his parents accompanied him to his medical appointments. His father, a school superintendent, asked perceptive questions about his sons condition. But his son was terrified that any suggestion on my part that he had AIDS would out him to his parents and alienate them from him just when he needed them the most. So I would answer the fathers questions only by saying that his son had a very serious malignancy, and couldnt discuss what was truly going on.

The focus of my research ever since has been HIV and AIDS, primarily how to reduce transmission of the virus. One of the primary lessons Ive learned, however, has little to do with biology: It is how social forces can amplify the transmission of hitherto obscure pathogens. It is clear to me that we will not succeed against SARS-CoV-2 unless we apply the following lessons from the AIDS epidemic:

Science matters. Support for getting people trained to be able to do science matters. Promotion of scientific literacy matters. Science is the creation of new knowledge. There are no such thing as alternative facts. As scientific knowledge expands, so does our understanding of the facts.

Discrimination is toxic. The failure to address the upstream causes of discrimination at the outset of an infectious disease outbreak will make things much worse than they otherwise would be. Homophobia, transphobia, sexism, and racism fueled the HIV epidemic. Racism and economic inequality are fueling the Covid-19 pandemic. The disproportionate impact of Covid-19 infections and health outcomes among people of color in the United States is testament to the urgent need to reduce and eliminate racial and linguistic inequities in scientific research, medical treatment, and disease prevention.

We are all in this together. We live in a global village and share a global gene pool. The HIV epidemic began in Central Africa, and disseminated because of urbanization and increased global mobility. SARS-CoV-2 apparently first appeared in China. But no country owns any virus or other pathogen since the patterns of dissemination of any of these wild organisms depends on human behavior, in addition to intrinsic properties of the pathogen.

AIDS taught us epidemiologic humility: There is only so much we can do. But we can do a lot. Former President George W. Bushs Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) saved millions of lives and is one of the most successful global public health interventions in history. As we scale up to vaccinate increasing numbers of individuals against SARS-CoV-2 in the U.S., Americans must understand that the pandemic is not over here until its over everywhere.

Kenneth H. Mayer is an infectious disease physician, medical research director of Fenway Health, co-director of The Fenway Institute, attending physician in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and professor of global health and population at the Harvard T.C. Chan School of Public Health.

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40 years of AIDS taught us epidemiologic humility. We need to apply that lesson in fighting Covid-19 - STAT - STAT

Human Behavior

Optic nerve firing may spark growth of vision-threatening childhood tumor – National Institutes of Health

June 5, 2021 medical

News Release

Tuesday, June 1, 2021

NIH-funded pre-clinical study supports key role of neural activity in brain cancers.

In a study of mice, researchers showed how the act of seeing light may trigger the formation of vision-harming tumors in young children who are born with neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) cancer predisposition syndrome. The research team, funded by the National Institutes of Health, focused on tumors that grow within the optic nerve, which relays visual signals from the eyes to brain. They discovered that the neural activity which underlies these signals can both ignite and feed the tumors. Tumor growth was prevented or slowed by raising young mice in the dark or treating them with an experimental cancer drug during a critical period of cancer development.

Brain cancers recruit the resources they need from the environment they are in, said Michelle Monje, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of neurology at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, and co-senior author of the study published in Nature. To fight brain cancers, you have to know your enemies. We hope that understanding how brain tumors weaponize neural activity will ultimately help us save lives and reduce suffering for many patients and their loved ones.

The study was a joint project between Dr. Monjes team and scientists in the laboratory of David H. Gutmann, M.D., Ph.D., the Donald O. Schnuck Family Professor and the director of the Neurofibromatosis Center at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

In 2015, Dr. Monjes team showed for the first time that stimulation of neural activity in mice can speed the growth of existing malignant brain tumors and that this enhancement may be controlled by the secretion of a protein called neuroligin-3. In this new study, the researchers hoped to test out these ideas during earlier stages of tumor development.

Over the years, cancer researchers have become more and more focused on the role of the tumor microenvironment in cancer development and growth. Until recently, neuronal activity has not been considered, as most studies have focused on immune and vascular cell interactions, said Jane Fountain, Ph.D., program director at the NIHs National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), which partially funded the study. This study is one of the first to show a definitive role for neurons in influencing tumor initiation. Its both scary and exciting to see that controlling neuronal activity can have such a profound influence on tumor growth.

Specifically, the researchers chose to study optic nerve gliomas in mice. Gliomas are formed from newborn cells that usually become a type of brain cell called glia. The tumors examined in this study are reminiscent of those found in about 15-20% of children who are born with a genetic mutation that causes NF1. About half of these children develop vision problems.

Dr. Gutmann helped discover the disease-causing mutation linked to NF1 and its encoded protein, neurofibromin, while working in a lab at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, which was then led by the current NIH director, Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. Since then, the Gutman teams pioneering work on NF1, and particularly NF1-brain tumors, has greatly shaped the medical research communitys understanding of low-grade glioma formation and progression.

Based on multiple lines of converging evidence, we knew that these optic nerve gliomas arose from neural precursor cells. However, the tumor cells required help from surrounding non-cancerous cells in the optic nerve to form gliomas, said Dr. Gutmann, who was also a senior author of this study. While we had previously shown that immune cells, like T-cells and microglia, provide growth factors essential for tumor growth, the big question was: What role did neurons and neural activity play in optic glioma initiation and progression?

To address this, the researchers performed experiments on mice engineered by the Gutmann laboratory to generate tumors that genetically resembled human NF1-associated optic gliomas. Typically, optic nerve gliomas appear in these mice between six to sixteen weeks of age.

Initial experiments suggested that optic nerve activity drives the formation of the tumors. Artificially stimulating neural activity during the critical ages of tumor development enhanced cancer cell growth, resulting in bigger optic nerve tumors. In contrast, raising the mice in the dark during that same time completely prevented new tumors from forming.

Interestingly, the exact timing of the dark period also appeared to be important. For instance, two out of nine mice developed tumors when they were raised in the dark beginning at twelve weeks of age.

These results suggest there is a temporal window during childhood development when genetic susceptibility and visual system activity critically intersect. If a susceptible neural precursor cell receives the key signals at a vulnerable time, then it will become cancerous. Otherwise no tumors form, said Yuan Pan, Ph.D., a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford and the lead author. We needed to understand how this happens at a molecular level.

Further experiments supported the idea that neuroligin-3 may be a key player in this process. For instance, the scientists found high levels of neuroligin-3 gene activity in both mouse and human gliomas. Conversely, silencing the neuroligin-3 gene prevented tumors from developing in the neurofibromatosis mice.

Traditionally, neuroligin-3 proteins are thought to act like tie rods that physically brace neurons together at communication points called synapses. In this study, the researchers found that the protein may work differently. The optic nerves of neurofibromatosis mice raised under normal light conditions had higher levels of a short, free-floating version of neuroligin-3 than the nerves of mice raised in the dark.

Previously our lab showed that neural activity causes shedding of neuroligin-3 and that this shedding hastens malignant brain tumor growth. Here our results suggest that neuroligin-3 shedding is the link between neural activity and optic nerve glioma formation. Visual activity causes shedding and shedding, in turn, transforms susceptible cells into gliomas, said Dr. Monje.

Finally, the researchers showed that an experimental drug may be effective at combating gliomas. The drug is designed to block the activity of ADAM10, a protein that is important for neuroligin-3 shedding. Treating the neurofibromatosis mutant mice with the drug during the critical period of six to sixteen weeks after birth prevented the development of tumors. Treatment delayed to twelve weeks did not prevent tumor formation but reduced the growth of the optic gliomas.

These results show that understanding the relationship between neural activity and tumor growth provides promising avenues for novel treatments of NF-1 optic gliomas, said Jill Morris, Ph.D., program director, NINDS.

Dr. Monjes team is currently testing neuroligin-3-targeting drugs and light exposure modifications that may in the future help treat patients with this form of cancer.

This work was supported by grants from the NIH (NS092597, NS111132, NS097211, CA165962, EY026877, EY029137, CA233164); the Department of Defense (W81XWH-15-1-0131, W81XWH-19-1-0260); Brantleys Project supported by Ians Friends Foundation; Gilbert Family Foundation; Robert J. Kleberg, Jr. and Helen C. Kleberg Foundation; Cancer Research UK; Unravel Pediatric Cancer; McKenna Claire Foundation; Kyle OConnell Foundation; Virginia and D. K. Ludwig Fund for Cancer Research; Waxman Family Research Fund; Stanford Maternal and Child Health Research Institute; Stanford Bio-X Institute; Will Irwin Research Fund; Research to Prevent Blindness, Inc.; Schnuck Markets Inc., and Alexs Lemonade Stand Foundation.

This news release describes a basic research finding. Basic research increases our understanding of human behavior and biology, which is foundational to advancing new and better ways to prevent, diagnose, and treat disease. Science is an unpredictable and incremental process each research advance builds on past discoveries, often in unexpected ways. Most clinical advances would not be possible without the knowledge of fundamental basic research. To learn more about basic research at NIH, visit https://www.nih.gov/news-events/basic-research-digital-media-kit.

NINDSis the nations leading funder of research on the brain and nervous system.The mission of NINDS is to seek fundamental knowledge about the brain and nervous system and to use that knowledge to reduce the burden of neurological disease.

About the National Institutes of Health (NIH):NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit http://www.nih.gov.

NIHTurning Discovery Into Health

Pan, Y. et al., NF1 mutation drives neuronal-activity dependent initiation of optic glioma. Nature, May 26, 2021 DOI: 10.1038/s41586-021-03580-6

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Optic nerve firing may spark growth of vision-threatening childhood tumor - National Institutes of Health