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In a concrete hangar in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico,
Katrina Mayes is working with precision and purpose. Wisps of smoke surround her, wafting off the dry ice she is using to jerry-rig a cardboard vaccine carrier. Her task: to create a vapor phase vent to moderate the temperature of the cooling container from around minus 80 degrees Celsius (for storing Pfizer’s COVID-19 vials) to minus 15 degrees Celsius (to accommodate supplies of the Moderna vaccine).
At 29, the biochemist and virologist has spent much of her professional life indoors, where the U.S. government has entrusted her to handle some of the world’s most lethal pathogens—including Ebola, Lassa fever, and Nipah viruses—at top-secret Biosafety Level Four facilities. “I shower six times a day,” she tells me. “I’m the cleanest person you’ll ever meet.” Her winning smile and gallows humor mask the gravity of her work, which has involved diffusing poison-laced letters that have been mailed to federal buildings.
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Poor roads hamper UNMISS peacekeepers on a rescue mission.
Even those working at removing and disabling mines as well as other potentially lethal remnants of war are not safe from attacks, including ambushes by rebels.
This was forcibly brought home recently in South Sudan where Rwandan soldiers on peacekeeping duty with UNMISS (UN Mission in South Sudan) rescued
UNMAS (UN Mine Action Service) workers after they were ambushed in Longiro, 60km north of Torit in Equatoria.
The deminers are part of G4S Global team contracted by the world body’s specialist demining group.
The UNMAS team were returning from Torit with food and cash supplies for a sister team in Longiro when they were surrounded by about 30 gunmen at a roadblock.