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BBC Inside Science: Vaccine Dosing and Biodiversity Soundscape Monitoring

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Vaccine Dosing and Biodiversity Soundscape Monitoring

BBC Radio 4 - BBC Inside Science, Vaccine Dosing and Biodiversity Soundscape Monitoring

Spacing vaccine doses, and monitoring biodiversity through sound and machine learning.

Marnie Chesterton and guests look at the evidence3 behind the UK government's vaccine spacing decision, and we put a machine learning ear across the forests of Borneo.

After the decision by the UK government last week to change the spacing between dosings of vaccine from the recommended 3 weeks to 12 weeks, immunologists around the world have been discussing with some urgency the wisdom of such a move. The FDA and the WHO are deeply sceptical, and the manufacturers have distanced themselves to some extent, by cautioning not to deviate from the regime tested in last year's phase III trials. The thinking behind the move is to get more people injected with a single dose in a shorter time, and that the longer wait for the second shot is worth the risk, if it means more people receive some level of protection in the short term.

Clinical Epidemiologist Dr Deepthi Gurdasani and Immunoligist Prof Danny Altmann of Imperial College describe to Marnie how evidence, experience and hunch are combining in the face of the covid crisis, and quite what we know, what we don't and what we could, about this nationwide experiment. 

Increasingly, ecologists wanting to monitor remote areas are relying on such things as solar powered audio recorders to measure biodiversity in the sounds of the wild. But how to scrutinize years and years worth of 24 hour, multi-site recordings? Sarab Sethi and colleagues have not only been leaving solar-powered Raspberry Pi recorders out in the jungles of Borneo, they've been using machine learning techniques to look out for species and biodiversity changes from afar. You can listen to some of the Borneo work at the SAFE acoustic website (link on BBC page below).

Presented by Marnie Chesterton

Produced by Alex Mansfield

Made in collaboration with the Open University.

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