Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Walters: It’s time to make the UK green
HARRY Potter star Julie Walters joined more than 100 high-profile parents to call for a green economy.
The actress, 70, signed an open letter to the Prime Minister demanding a low-carbon recovery after the Covid-19 pandemic.
Author Michael Morpurgo, TV presenter Lorraine Kelly, model Lily Cole and singer Paloma Faith also signed.
The letter urges Boris Johnson not to “build our way out of one disaster by supercharging the next”.
Dinnerladies star Julie added: “For the sake of our children, we need governments to [prevent] an even greater climate catastrophe.”
The letter was co-ordinated by parent groups Mothers Rise Up and Parents For Future UK.
Coronavirus is believed to have originated in bats, and was then passed on to humans via another as yet unknown species. Now scientists are a step closer to understanding how bats carry coronaviruses without getting sick themselves – and say this knowledge may provide solutions to help humans fight future pandemics.
An international team of researchers has genetically decoded six species of bat, which helps to explain why they have evolved differently from other mammals.
Prof Emma Teeling, of University College Dublin and co-founder of the Bat1K project, says the “exquisite” genome sequences that they have unravelled suggest bats have “unique immune systems”.
“If we could mimic the immune response of bats to viruses that allows them to tolerate them, then you could look to nature to find a cure,” she says.
“We now have the tools to be able to understand the steps we need to take; we need to develop the drugs to do it.”