DUST from African deserts may be spreading disease across the world's coral reefs, say researchers who also blame the fallout for a global rise in respiratory infections.
Dick Barber of Duke University in Beaufort, North Carolina, says that prolonged drought in the Sahel region of Africa since the mid-1970s has increased the amount of atmospheric dust fivefold. Blown high into the atmosphere and carried around the world by winds, the dust contains bacteria, viruses and fungi that can kill coral. It is also rich in iron, which can fertilise algae that smother reefs, Barber told a meeting of the US Global Change Research Program in Washington DC last week.
Coral reefs are being blighted with epidemics including white band and black band disease and a bacterial infection known as "coral plague". Outbreaks of these diseasesand others that were previously unknownhave coincided with years when the dust load in the atmosphere ...
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