AFP UK

A much-touted cleanup of oil pollution in southern Nigeria has yet to start in parts of the hotspot Ogoniland, almost three years after contracts were handed out, and residents remain without proper drinking water, a report said Thursday.

Nigeria, Africa’s biggest crude producer, has struggled with oil spills for decades, triggering social unrest and even militancy across the Niger Delta.

The kingdom of Ogoniland in Rivers state, home to about a million people, became an emblem of the problem after years of oil and gas exploration and production by a joint venure with Shell.

After mass protests led by activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and the so-called Ogoni Nine, Shell stopped production in 1993.

The Nigerian government pledged to restore the damage after a United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) assessment of the area 10 years ago.

The UN said at the time that an initial cleanup would cost $1 billion and take five years. Cleanup activities finally started in January 2019. 

But a report by two NGO monitors issued more than halfway through the five-year timeframe says the cleanup will probably take far longer.

“We can see some progress being made, and it’s important to recognise that,” said Florence Kayemba, programmes director of the Stakeholder Democracy Network (SDN), which co-authored the report with the Centre for Human Rights and Development (CEHRD).

Over 1,000 temporary jobs for community members with cleanup contractors have been created, the monitors said.

Thirteen out of 50 lots considered “simple” to clean have been certified as completed, they added.

However, “this is just a quarter… and we have yet to begin cleanup of complex sites, so this shows that we have really quite a long way to go,” said Calvin Laing, SDN’s executive director. 

“That five-year target seems unrealistic now.” 

Emergency measures prescribed by the UN in 2011 “are yet to be delivered,” the report noted.

“Communities which were identified as having highly contaminated drinking water sources in 2011 still do not have access to improved, safe drinking water sources,” it said. 

“Health screening of communities that would help understand the impact of pollution is yet to commence.”

Cleanup activities need to happen “much faster” added Kayemba, but “without sacrificing quality.”

SDN and CEHRD set up an interactive online dashboard on Thursday to help track progress.

The Ogoniland cleanup is “crucial” said Laing, as it “could also be a template for elsewhere in the Niger Delta.”

Earlier this year, Shell agreed to pay around 95 million euros ($110 million) to Ogoniland communities over spills in the 1970s, although it has said damage to pipelines was caused by third parties. 

Torrential rains caused widespread floods in the southern Yemeni city of Mukalla, where a young man was electrocuted, local official said on Thursday.

The floods added to suffering in the Arabian peninsula’s poorest country, which has endured seven years of war.

The rain lashed Mukalla on Wednesday days after a powerful cyclone was downgraded to a tropical storm after making landfall in Oman where 12 people were killed.

A Yemeni official said the rains caused flooding that swept away cars in Mukalla, damaged shops and homes, and knocked down electricity poles.

“At least 10 cars were swept away and (several) homes were damaged, while a young man died of electric shock,” said the official who declined to be named.

The cars were left upended in water-logged, muddy streets.

Meteorologists in Aden, Yemen’s second city west of Mukalla on the country’s south coast, had expected a fallout from Cyclone Shaheen which struck neighbouring Oman on Sunday before being downgraded to a tropical depression.

Across the Gulf in Iran, six people were reported dead while the United Arab Emirates, which borders Oman, was also put on alert.

Dozens of people are killed each year across Yemen in flash floods caused by heavy rains.

In May, the United Nations reported that around 3,700 families had been affected by torrential rains and floods that had caused havoc in Yemen since mid-April. Authorities said at least four people were killed.

About 80 percent of Yemen’s 30 million people are dependent on aid, in what the United Nations has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Yemen’s grinding conflict has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced millions since 2015, when a Saudi-led military coalition intervened in the country to shore up the government. Iran Iran-backed Huthi rebels had seized the capital Sanaa the previous year.

Clouds of thick ash from the volcano on La Palma on Thursday forced the island’s airport to close for the second time since the eruption began last month, Spain’s airport authority said. 

“La Palma airport is not operational due to the accumulation of ash,” AENA tweeted, with a spokeswoman telling AFP “some cleaning work needs to be done” on the runways before it would reopen. 

The airport was briefly shut on September 25 after a thick cloud of black ash forced airlines to cancel flights. 

Although it was reopened a day later, flights did not resume until September 29. 

It has been 18 days since La Cumbre Vieja began erupting, forcing more than 6,000 people out of their homes as the lava burnt its way across huge swathes of land on La Palma, one of Spain’s Atlantic Canary Islands that lie off the northwestern coast of Morocco.

The AENA spokeswoman said Thursday’s airport closure “may not last very long”. 

David Calvo, spokesman for Involcan, the Canary Islands volcanic institute, said the volcano was producing “a lot of ash”, saying a change in the wind meant the ash cloud was “affecting the airport”.

On Wednesday evening, local airline Binter had said it was cancelling all flights in and out of La Palma.

“This suspension will last until conditions improve and we can fly safely,” Binter tweeted, with rival airline Canaryfly also suspending flights. 

An AFP correspondent at the scene said the glowing lava streams could still be seen for miles around on Wednesday night. 

By Thursday morning, images released by the Spanish Geological and Mining Institute (IGME) showed a thick cloud of black smoke billowing from the crater of Cumbre Vieja. 

– The 100-acre lava delta –

Pumping out endless streams of molten rock with a temperature of over 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 degrees Fahrenheit), the volcano spewed out streams of lava that consumed more than 1,000 acres (422 hectares) of land as it cut a six-kilometre (3.5-mile) path to the sea. 

Once it reached the coast on September 29, it cascaded into the sea, creating a growing lava delta that is currently the size of 60 football pitches (100 acres), Involcan data shows. 

And figures released on Tuesday by the islands’ regional government said more than 605 of the destroyed buildings were homes. 

It has also destroyed huge swathes of banana plantations — the chief cash crop on La Palma. 

“The damage is enormous.. We are talking about a third of the banana production of the entire Canary Islands,” the archipelago’s regional head Angel Víctor Torres said last week, indicating the current harvest had been “completely lost”.

The eruption on La Palma, an island of some 85,000 people, is the first in 50 years. 

The last was in 1971 when another part of the same volcanic range — a vent known as Teneguia — erupted on the southern side of the island. 

Two decades earlier, the Nambroque vent erupted in 1949. 

China will on Monday launch a crucial biodiversity summit to build political momentum to halt and even reverse the destruction of nature by man.

As the human population climbs toward nine billion by mid-century, animals are being crowded, eaten, snared, poisoned, poached, hawked and hunted out of existence.

Forests have been burned to the ground to grow commercial crops, and ecosystems that sustain life on the planet ravaged.

The virtual opening of the COP15 summit will transfer leadership from Egypt, which presided over the last gathering in 2018, to China. 

During the talks, Beijing will orchestrate high-level online meetings with ministers from scores of countries in a drive to build political momentum. 

China — by far the world’s biggest emitter of carbon pollution that drives global warming and harms the environment — will also issue a “Kunming Declaration” that will set the tone for its leadership, observers say.

“This declaration, we hope, will further underline and recognise the importance of biodiversity for human health,” said Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), a treaty ratified by 195 countries and the European Union.

“It will also recognise the importance of mainstreaming biodiversity in decision-making and will serve also as a tool to create the political momentum,” she told AFP. 

Since gathering in person in Rome last year, delegates have negotiated across cyberspace.

– Urgent targets –

Next week’s online meet will be followed by in-person talks in Kunming from April 25 to May 8, with an intermediate session, also face-to-face, in Geneva in January.

The November COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, meanwhile, will seek to tame the increasingly devastating effects of global warming.

Discussions will focus on a negotiated draft text called the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. 

Published in July, its stated goal is “living in harmony with nature” by 2050. 

That “harmony” will be defined by mid-century goals with 2030 reality checks in the form of 21 “targets for urgent action” over the next decade.

Targets include declaring 30 percent of land and sea as protected areas, the end of plastic waste in the oceans, and sustainable management of agriculture, aquaculture and forestry.

Financial targets include boosting investment in biodiversity protection to $200 billion per year within a decade, while reducing subsidies for environmentally harmful industries by “at least US $500 billion per year”.

It asks that individual governments implement strategies and devise reporting methods to make it easier to measure progress.

The document insists that follow-up is crucial to ensure targets do not remain a list of empty promises.

– ‘Sad truth’ –

Sharp divisions remain.

France and Costa Rica are among a coalition of support for the initiative to declare 30 percent of oceans and lands protected areas before 2030.

But when scientists called for more ambitious protection of half of Earth’s biodiversity, Brazil and South Africa strongly opposed.  

Other sources of tension surround financing, with developing nations asking rich countries to foot the bill for their ecological transitions.

These issues will be at the heart of negotiation sessions set to take place in Geneva in January 2022.

“It is concerning that these issues have not been dealt with sufficiently,” said Li Shuo, global policy advisor for Greenpeace China. 

“The sad truth is countries simply don’t care about biodiversity in other countries as much as they do for emissions others pump into the air,” he told AFP, referring to the carbon pollution that drives global warming.

But while the protection of nature isn’t getting the kind of buzz the climate has been able to generate, biodiversity has gotten more visibility than it used to.

At the end of September Jeff Bezos and Mike Bloomberg joined other philanthropists in pledging $5 billion by 2030 for biodiversity restoration and conservation.

Just weeks before the crucial COP26 climate conference, another global UN summit — this one tasked with reversing the destruction of nature — officially kicks off next week in Kunming, China.

Focusing on biodiversity, COP15 is less well known than its sister climate summit but deals with issues that are no less vital to the health of the planet, such as fighting pollution, protecting ecosystems and preventing mass extinction.

The online session beginning on Monday will be followed by a face-to-face gathering in late April, where a final pact for nature will be hammered out.

– Who is involved? –

Discussions at the COP15 are grounded in the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), a treaty ratified by 195 countries and the European Union — but not the United States, the world’s biggest historical polluter. Parties meet every two years.

The CBD was drafted in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio. Its stated goals are to preserve the diversity of species on Earth and set guidelines on how to exploit natural resources sustainably and justly.

This year’s gathering, originally set for 2020, was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

– Why does nature need protection? –

Plants and animals are disappearing at an accelerating rate due to human activity — habitat encroachment, over-exploitation, pollution, the spread of invasive species and, more recently, climate change.

“Biodiversity is declining at unprecedented rates,” CBD executive secretary Elizabeth Maruma Mrema told AFP in an interview. 

“About one million animal and plant species out of 8.1 million are threatened with extinction — more than ever before in human history.”

Humanity’s expanding footprint is also undermining the ecosystems that produce the clean air, drinkable water, food, medicine and raw materials we need to survive.

“Our relationship with nature must change,” said Maruma Mrema.

The Covid-19 pandemic, thought to have originated from a virus in wild animals, is a “brutal reminder” of the price we can pay for neglecting or abusing nature, she said.

– What has the CBD achieved? –

At the 2010 biodiversity summit in Aichi, Japan, CBD member states laid out 20 goals to preserve biological diversity and reduce human pressures on the environment, setting a 2020 deadline for achieving them.

None of the objectives was fulfilled by that deadline, and — with a few exceptions — conditions are generally worse today than when the goals were first set.

This year’s negotiations will likely see a new set of targets designed to allow our species to “live in harmony with nature”, with a 2050 deadline and 2030 checkpoints.

– What are this year’s goals? –

The draft text under negotiation, the Framework Biodiversity Convention, provisionally sets 21 “targets” for 2030. 

These include according protected status to 30 percent of lands and oceans, a measure supported by a broad coalition of nations, including France and Costa Rica.

Another goal is to halve the use of fertilisers so that less of the nitrogen-rich substance leaches into fresh and ocean waters. 

The draft pact also calls for reducing pesticide use by at least two thirds, and for halting the discharge of plastic waste entirely.

Another measure would see subsidies for environmentally harmful industries reduced by “at least $500 billion per year”. 

Without money and enforcement, however, these measures risk becoming empty promises, experts warn.

– Are COP15 and COP26 linked? –

Yes and no. Negotiations under the two conventions unfold on separate tracks and do not intersect. But parties to both treaties are increasingly looking for overlapping solutions.

“We cannot solve climate change without biodiversity and we cannot solve biodiversity loss without climate change,” Maruma Mrema said. 

“They are two intertwined crises and they need to be addressed together.” 

Healthy ecosystems — especially forest and oceans — make better carbon sinks to absorb CO2 pollution. 

These in turn are vital to keep global warming down to levels that are survivable for humanity and other species.

– What is China’s role? –

Maruma Mrema says that China’s status as host for the negotiations means the world’s top carbon polluter and most populous nation will be “taking global leadership on the biodiversity agenda”.

A statement known as the Kunming Declaration to be unveiled at the opening next week will set the tone for China’s leadership, said Li Shuo, global policy advisor for Greenpeace China.

“Beijing has the task of rescuing a weak environmental convention from the verge of a reputational collapse,” he said. 

“It carries the mission to boost biodiversity protection to the same rank as climate change, a task that has proven beyond its reach so far.” 

Standing on a boat bobbing gently in the Red Sea, Egyptian diving instructor Mohamed Abdelaziz looks on as tourists snorkel amid the brilliantly coloured corals, a natural wonder now under threat from climate change. 

“If they disappear, we’ll disappear with them,” he says of the vibrant corals on the reef, a species-rich ecosystem just below the turquoise waters that is beloved by diving enthusiasts worldwide.

Coral reefs — often dubbed the “rainforests of the oceans” for their rich biodiversity — are under threat everywhere as rising sea temperatures and acidification cause catastrophic “bleaching” events.

Along with pollution and dynamite fishing, global warming wiped out 14 percent of the world’s coral reefs between 2009 and 2018, says a new survey by the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, the biggest ever carried out. 

Some studies have suggested that many species of coral in the Red Sea — which is also bordered by the Saudi peninsula, Sudan and Eritrea — are unusually heat-resistant, but local professionals say they have already witnessed the damage. 

“We can see the effects of global warming before our eyes,” said Islam Mohsen, 37, another local diving instructor at the resort town of Sharm El-Sheikh. 

“We can see the coral discolouring and turning white.”

– Biodiversity hotspots –

Coral reefs cover only a tiny fraction — 0.2 percent — of the ocean floor, but they are home to at least a quarter of all marine animals and plants.

The Red Sea and Gulf of Aden boast the most biologically diverse coral reef communities outside of Southeast Asia.

The Red Sea — with just over five percent of the world’s coral reefs — is home to 209 types of coral, according to Egypt’s environment ministry. 

The new global survey said that live hard coral cover in the region fluctuated over recent decades but declined overall, from 36.1 percent in 1997 to 34.3 percent in 2019.

Causes for the degraded reefs varied by location but included tourism activities, coastal development, land runoff and overfishing, the report said.

Steps have been taken in Egypt to protect reefs and marine life that are crucial to the local tourism sector.

Egypt’s Chamber of Diving and Water Sports — which oversees 269 diving centres and over 2,900 professional divers — has protected fragile areas with buoys to keep boats from mooring.

It has also suspended beginners’ diving classes in some areas to allow damaged reefs to recover. 

But the largest looming threat, far harder to fix, is global warming.

– Marine heatwaves –

Oceans absorb more than 90 percent of the excess heat from greenhouse gas emissions, shielding land surfaces but generating huge, long-lasting marine heatwaves.

These are pushing many species of corals past their limits of tolerance.

“When the temperature of the ocean goes up, it absorbs more carbon dioxide, which creates carbonic acid,” said Cairo-based climate change consultant Katherine Jones.

“So not only will the temperature increase, but the PH level will change too,” affecting all animals with shells, she said. “We will lose a lot of wildlife, and the ecosystem will be changing in a way that affects us as humans in terms of resources.

“The coral reefs are nurseries to baby fish and a feeding ground to bigger fish … it’s an essential part of the ecosystem.”

Sharm El-Sheikh hosted a United Nations agencies conference in 2018 that called for the protection of coral reefs “before it’s too late”. 

Egypt also plans to host the Climate Conference of the Parties (COP27) in November next year.

A report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that up to 90 percent of coral reefs “may be gone by mid-century” even if the rise in temperatures stabilises below 1.5 degrees Celsius. 

Jones warned that, as things stand now, climate change and its impacts can no longer be reversed — only slowed — to prevent the worst consequences.

“Even if humans completely disappear from Earth tomorrow or we stopped producing any kind of emissions,” she said, “the temperature will continue to rise by itself.”

Clouds of thick ash from the erupting volcano on La Palma on Thursday forced the island’s airport to close for the second time since the September 19 eruption, Spain’s airport authority said. 

“The airport is not in operation at the moment,” an AENA spokeswoman told AFP, saying “some cleaning work needs to be done” on the runways before it would reopen. 

But the closure “may not last very long” she added. 

On Wednesday evening, local airline Binter had said it was cancelling all flights in and out of La Palma, one of Spain’s Canary Islands archipelago in the Atlantic, just off the northwestern coast of Africa. 

“This suspension will last until conditions improve and we can fly safely,” Binter tweeted, with rival airline CanaryFly also suspending flights. 

The airport was briefly shut on September 25 after a thick cloud of black ash forced airlines to cancel flights. 

Although it was reopened a day later, flights did not resume until September 29. 

Britain is eager to brandish its environmental credentials before the upcoming COP26 summit, but it is grappling at the same time with mounting protests from climate activists.

Direct action group Extinction Rebellion has brought cities to a standstill and vowed to do the same at the UN climate change conference in Glasgow later this month.

In recent weeks, a previously unheard-of offshoot, Insulate Britain, has also caused gridlock on motorways and main roads, sparking scores of arrests and a court injunction.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Wednesday called the protesters a “confounded nuisance” and welcomed moves for “new powers to insulate them snugly in prison where they belong”.

The government is keen to lead the way on reducing carbon emissions and ensure new binding targets to cut global warming are met at the summit.

But it is also takes its cues from a largely right-wing British press that is increasingly hostile towards the activists and calls them an “eco-mob” and “enviro-idiots”.

Both Extinction Rebellion and Insulate Britain have been accused of putting lives in danger with their tactics, which have included protesters gluing themselves to the tarmac and sitting in front of rush-hour traffic.

On Monday, footage showed one desperate driver begging to be let through a protest in south London so she could follow an ambulance carrying her mother to hospital.

– Beards and woolly hats-

When Extinction Rebellion founder Roger Hallam was asked whether he would block an ambulance carrying a dying patient, his reply was simply: “Yes.”

But other activists disagree.

“We are heartbroken by all of this. We’re not going out there to stop ambulances getting through,” said Tim Speers of Insulate Britain.

Speers, 36, from Cornwall, in southwest England, bears little resemblance to the media caricature of an environmentalist — a bearded, woolly hatted “crusty” as Johnson has called them.

Clean-shaven, fast-talking and a former professional poker player, Speers said he left his old life behind to fight climate change through civil disobedience.

“As soon as they come out with a meaningful statement that they will get on with their job, they will meet their own targets, I will get off the road,” he said. 

“I cannot sit by while this government completely fails the citizens it is obliged to protect.”

Britain has seen many environmental protests in the past, like the ones over infrastructure projects such as a road bypass near Newbury, western England, in the 1990s.

Daniel Hooper, nicknamed “Swampy”, was one of the activists who tried to block construction by tunnelling under that site, and he re-emerged earlier this year on another protest in London.

He has been on trial with other campaigners, including the children of a millionaire landowner and publisher, for trying to prevent construction of the HS2 high-speed railway line.

The HS2 Rebellion group spent days in tunnels they secretly dug near the Euston mainline terminal.

On Monday, Speers was outside London’s Royal Courts of Justice as more than 100 protesters from the group were served with an injunction against blocking roads.

Some sported beards and woolly hats, but most were drawn from a diverse range of backgrounds, from parents and their children, to the elderly and even members of clergy.

Retired IT consultant Janine Eagling, 60, said that after 30 years of environmental campaigning she joined Insulate Britain because of the need for urgent action.

– ‘No tomorrow’ –

“We’re in a worse position than ever. We’re emitting C02 like there’s no tomorrow, which, if we carry on like this, then literally there will be no tomorrow,” she said.

“It may seem extreme that we’re disrupting people in their everyday lives… (but) Insulate Britain has got one simple demand.”

Home Secretary Priti Patel on Tuesday announced new measures to deal with Insulate Britain, which wants all British homes to be environmentally efficient, and others.

She said she would not tolerate “eco-warriors trampling over our way of life and draining police resources” as she announced maximum penalties for motorway disruptions and plans to criminalise interference with infrastructure.

Insulate Britain blasted Patel and other ministers as “cowards”, warning that blaming campaigners would do more harm than good in the long run.

“Shooting the messenger can never destroy the message: our country is facing the greatest risk ever and our government is failing us”, they said.

Confrontation could be on the cards in Glasgow, with a planned rally of 50,000 to 100,000 people during the summit.

Police Scotland, which is deploying some 10,000 officers every day of the two-week meeting, has said it will facilitate peaceful demos and “unlawful protest to a point”.

But it has warned action may have to be taken “when the protest starts to impinge on the ability of conference to operate”.

Beaches normally thronged with the bronzed torsos of surfers are deserted as California races to clean up a huge oil spill.

Up to 131,000 gallons of crude could have leaked into the Pacific Ocean on the west coast of the United States when a pipeline ruptured at the weekend.

Authorities are investigating whether a ship’s anchor could have ripped open the pipe, dragging it more than 100 feet (30 meters) along the seafloor.

A 15-mile (24-kilometer) stretch of coast has been closed to the public — including some prime surfing spots that are usually packed with boarders.

“It’s weird to see no surfing out there for miles. It’s very strange,” said Shawna Sakal, manager of a surf store just yards from Huntington Beach pier.

“There’s always people surfing, they’re doing it year-round. The ocean is full of surfers, especially on the north and south side of the pier.”

Huntington Beach revolves around surfing. Equipment rental and sales stores jostle for space with surf schools.

But almost all of them are now shuttered. 

For the tight-knit community of surfers, that’s tough.

“We have a bunch of friends that just surf, so sometimes we don’t even text each other,” said 18-year-old Jake McNerney. “We’ll just see each other out there.”

– Logjam –

More than 300 personnel are involved in the emergency response to the spill, which has been traced to a pipeline near Long Beach.

Dozens of container ships are anchored off the harbor there — one of the world’s busiest container ports — waiting for a berth in a pandemic-sparked shipping logjam.

The Los Angeles Times cited a federal investigator as saying a misplaced anchor from one of these ships was the most likely cause of the pipeline’s rupture.

Officials said almost 5,000 gallons of crude have been recovered so far, and more than a dozen birds covered in oil have been rescued.

Clean-up crews in protective gear could be seen on Newport Beach, further down the coastline, with weather patterns pushing oil south.

– School –

Powder blue skies and warm sunshine offered perfect beach weather on Wednesday, but stores and restaurants that rely on visitors were empty.

“Probably 50 percent of our business we probably lost so far,” said Sakal, whose father has been selling the surfboards he makes in their family-run store for five decades.

October is prime surfing time.

“It’s the best for surfers, and it’s best for people that live here. The weather’s really nice during this time,” said Sakal. 

“It gets hot in the inland areas, so they all come to the beach on the weekends, but they can’t come to the beach now because of the oil spill.”

The disaster has also put a hole in the curriculum of one local school, where surf skills count as a credit towards graduation.

“We had just begun our competitive season the week before the spill,” says Lisa Battig of Fountain Valley School, located just minutes from the beach.

“All five teams also operate as classes and students receive PE (physical education) credit.

“We will be staying out of our local waters until we receive the all clear from the agencies.”

In the meantime, students will be practicing on land, she says, and traveling out of the area to surf at the weekend.

But they will be doing their part to help speed along the clean-up.

“When and if it is safe and reasonable, the students will also get involved with clean-up,” she said.

Dengue affects tens of millions each year, producing brutal symptoms that have earned it the moniker “breakbone fever,” but new research may have found the first-ever treatment for the virus.

Tests in cell cultures and mice found that a newly identified compound can effectively disarm dengue, stopping it from replicating and preventing disease, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

And it appears to be effective whether taken protectively before infection or as a treatment after the virus is contracted.

It is an “exciting” development in the battle against dengue, according to Scott Biering and Eva Harris of the University of California, Berkeley’s School of Public Health.

It “represents a major advance in the field of dengue therapeutics,” the pair, who were not involved in the research, wrote in a review in Nature.

There is no doubt about the threat posed by the mosquito-borne dengue virus, which is estimated to infect at least 98 million people a year and is endemic in 128 countries worldwide.

It can cause intense flu-like symptoms, and sometimes develops into severe dengue which can be fatal.

And because there are four different strains, infection with one does not protect against another, and catching dengue a second time is often more serious.

No treatment exists so far, with efforts focusing instead on reducing transmission — including a programme that infects mosquitoes with disease-resistant bacteria.

A vaccine called Dengvaxia is approved for use only in some countries and is effective against a single strain.

– ‘Unprecedented’ –

Enter the unassumingly named JNJ-A07, a compound found by screening thousands of potential candidates, in a process researcher Johan Neyts described as like “looking for a needle in a haystack”.

It turned out to be worth the wait.

Its effect “in infected animals is unprecedented”, Neyts, who helped lead the research, told AFP.

“Even if treatment is started at the time of peak viral replication there is important antiviral activity,” added Neyts, a professor of virology at the University of Leuven, Belgium.

JNJ-A07 works by targeting the interaction between two proteins in the dengue virus that are key to its replication, and it worked effectively against all four strains.

Dengue can evolve quickly, but the team found JNJ-A07 was unlikely to face significant challenges from drug resistance.

“It took us in the lab, in infected cells, almost half a year before we could obtain important resistance (to the treatment),” said Neyts.

“Given that the barrier to resistance is so high, it is very unlikely that this will clinically be a problem.”

Intriguingly, the mutations that caused resistance also appeared to make the virus incapable of replicating in mosquito cells.

That could suggest that even if the virus develops resistance to JNJ-A07, it would no longer be transmissible via mosquitoes, effectively reaching a dead end in its host.

– Clinical trials in progress –

Promisingly, the compound was effective whether administered to mice before infection or afterwards.

The version of the compound reported in Nature has now been “further slightly optimised” and is in clinical development by Johnson & Johnson, Neyts said.

In a statement, Johnson & Johnson chief scientific officer Paul Stoffels said the work had “tremendous potential to… transform the world’s fight against this significant and growing public threat”.

There are still questions to answer however, including whether the compound could increase vulnerability to reinfection.

When people contract dengue, the presence of the virus in their blood — known as viraemia — generally stimulates a potent immune response that protects them from future infection.

But in some people, the immune response is weaker and that leaves them vulnerable to reinfection with different strains, which can produce more serious symptoms.

Given that JNJ-A07 works to reduce viraemia, Biering and Harris said research was needed into whether this might leave people more susceptible to reinfection.

Despite the unknowns, Neyts said the study offered exciting possibilities.

“Seeing the compound work so potently in animals was breathtaking,” he said, describing the research as “an amazing ride”.