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While serving from December 1970 to January 1972 as a medical doctor of the 21st French Polar Expedition in Adelie Land, Antarctica, at Dumont d’Urville Station, the author diagnosed Schistosoma haematobiumurinary bilharziasis in a winterer who suffered from pain in the right iliac fossa, at the beginning of the overwintering. The patient had participated in a bush investigation in West Africa, but, despite his complaints, the illness had not been diagnosed prior to the Antarctic expedition. Microscopic examination revealed Schistosoma haematobium eggs in the urine centrifugation deposit. In the absence of anti-bilharziasis medication, the patient was treated symptomatically with urinary antiseptic or antibiotic, hemostatic and antihistamine medications to palliate the egg deposition in the bladder wall and the subsequent induction of inflammatory reactions. Nine months later, a US Navy plane landed on the continent in the vicinity of the French Station and delivered the specific parasiticidal niridazole tablets. The patient received three niridazole tablets per day during one week. He returned to Paris in March 1972. Exploratory medical tests did not reveal any bladder or urinary tract alteration. He never since complained of any related problem. Recommendations are provided to avoid personal and / or operational risks due to such tropical infectious diseases during Antarctic expeditions.

Sixteen months after the January 30, 2020 declaration by the World Health Organization of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern regarding the spread of COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 had infected ~ 170 million humans worldwide of which > 3.5 million had died. We critically examine information on the virus origin, when and where the first human cases occurred, and point to differences between Chinese and later clinical presentations. The official patient Zero was hospitalized in Wuhan, Hubei province, China, on December 8, 2019, but retrospective analyses demonstrate prior viral circulation. Coronaviruses are present in mammals and birds, but whether a wild animal (e.g. bat, pangolin) was the source of the human pandemic remains disputed. We present two contamination models, the spillover versus the circulation model; the latter brings some interesting hypotheses about previous SARS-CoV-2 virus circulation in the human population. The age distribution of hospitalized COVID-19 patients at the start of the epidemic differed between China and the USA–EU; Chinese hospitalized patients were notably younger. The first Chinese publications did not describe anosmia-dysgeusia, a cardinal symptom of COVID-19 in Europe and USA. The prominent endothelial involvement linked with thrombotic complications was discovered later. These clinical discrepancies might suggest an evolution of the virus.

The emergence and global spread of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) is critical to understanding how to prevent or control a future viral pandemic. We review the tools used for this retrospective search, their limits, and results obtained from China, France, Italy and the USA. We examine possible scenarios for the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 in the human population. We consider the Chinese city of Wuhan where the first cases of atypical pneumonia were attributed to SARS-CoV-2 and from where the disease spread worldwide. Possible superspreading events include the Wuhan-based 7th Military World Games on October 18–27, 2019 and the Chinese New Year holidays from January 25 to February 2, 2020. Several clues point to an early regional circulation of SARS-CoV-2 in northern Italy (Lombardi) as soon as September/October 2019 and in France in November/December 2019, if not before. With the goal of preventing future pandemics, we call for additional retrospective studies designed to trace the origin of SARS-CoV-2.

COVID-19, the human primarily respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, commonly involves the nervous system, the effects of which may persist for many months. Post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 include relapsing and remitting neurological and neuropsychiatric symptoms that can affect children and adults, including those who had mild acute illness. Since longer-term adverse effects on the central and peripheral nervous system of COVID-19 cannot be excluded, patient and societal health trends should be monitored going forward. Urgent present needs include not only global immunization against SARS-CoV-2 but also the reestablishment of lapsed mass vaccination programs to prevent resurgence of other viral diseases (e.g., measles, polio) that can impact the nervous system.

As rock inhabitants, lichens are exposed to extreme and fluctuating abiotic conditions associated with poor sources of nutriments. These extreme conditions confer to lichens the unique ability to develop protective mechanisms. Consequently, lichen-associated microbes disclose highly versatile lifestyles and ecological plasticity, enabling them to withstand extreme environments. Because of their ability to grow in poor and extreme habitats, bacteria associated with lichens can tolerate a wide range of pollutants, and they are known to produce antimicrobial compounds. In addition, lichen-associated bacteria have been described to harbor ecological functions crucial for the evolution of the lichen holobiont. Nevertheless, the ecological features of lichen-associated microbes are still underestimated. To explore the untapped ecological diversity of lichen-associated bacteria, we adopted a novel culturomic approach on the crustose lichen Rhizocarpon geographicum. We sampled R. geographicum in French habitats exposed to oil spills, and we combined nine culturing methods with 16S rRNA sequencing to capture the greatest bacterial diversity. A deep functional analysis of the lichen-associated bacterial collection showed the presence of a set of bacterial strains resistant to a wide range of antibiotics and displaying tolerance to Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs). Our study is a starting point to explore the ecological features of the lichen microbiota.

The AMPERA (Atmospheric Measurement of Potential and ElectRic field on Aircraft) electric field network was integrated on the Falcon 20 (F20) of SAFIRE (the French facility for airborne research) in the framework of EXAEDRE (EXploiting new Atmospheric Electricity Data for Research and the Environment) project. From September 2018, an in-flight campaign was performed over Corsica (France) to investigate the electrical activity in thunderstorms. During this campaign, eight scientific flights were done inside or in the vicinity of a thunderstorm. The purpose of this paper is to present the AMPERA system and the atmospheric electrostatic field recorded during the flights, and particularly during the pass inside electrified clouds, in which the aircraft was struck by lightning. The highest value of atmospheric electrostatic field recorded during these flights was around 79 kV·m−1 at 8400 m of altitude. A normalization of these fields is done by computing the reduced atmospheric electrostatic field to take into account the altitude effect (ratio between the atmospheric electrostatic field and the air density). Most of the significant values of reduced atmospheric electrostatic field magnitude retrieved during this campaign occur between around 5.5 and 9.5 km and are included between 50 and 100 kV·m−1. The highest value measured of the reduced atmospheric electrostatic field is 194 kV·m−1 during the lightning strike of the F20. The merging of these results with data from former campaigns suggests that there is a threshold (depending of the aircraft size) for the striking of an aircraft.

To study the anatomo-biochemical substrates of brain inflammatory processes, Wistar male rats were infected with Trypanosoma brucei brucei. With this reproducible animal model of human African trypanosomiasis, brain cells (astrocytes, microglial cells, neurons) expressing the inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) enzyme were revealed. Immunohistochemistry was achieved for each control and infected animal through eight coronal brain sections taken along the caudorostral axis of the brain (brainstem, cerebellum, diencephalon and telencephalon). Specific markers of astrocytes (anti-glial fibrillary acidic protein), microglial cells (anti-integrin alpha M) or neurons (anti-Neuronal Nuclei) were employed. The iNOS staining was present in neurons, astrocytes and microglial cells, but not in oligodendrocytes. Stained astrocytes and microglial cells resided mainly near the third cavity in the rostral part of brainstem (periaqueductal gray), diencephalon (thalamus and hypothalamus) and basal telencephalon. Stained neurons were scarce in basal telencephalon, contrasting with numerous iNOS-positive neuroglial cells. Contrarily, in dorsal telencephalon (neocortex and hippocampus), iNOS-positive neurons were plentiful, contrasting with the marked paucity of labelled neuroglial (astrocytes and microglial) cells. The dual distribution between iNOS-labelled neuroglial cells and iNOS-labelled neurons is a feature that has never been described before. Functionalities attached to such a divergent distribution are discussed.