When it comes to the deployment and use of an HIV vaccine, researchers say even a partially effective vaccine, although not perfect, still could prevent millions of infections each year.

There are no AIDS vaccines in use, but many are in the development pipeline or clinical trials. The problem is the vaccines are turning out to be less effective than hoped.

To get a handle on what the future might hold, scientists at Oregon State University developed a mathematical model of HIV progression, transmission and intervention, tailored to 127 countries around the world.

According to the model, using current interventions, the world might expect to see about 49 million new cases of HIV in the next 20 years.

But the study concluded that 25 million of those infections might be prevented if ambitious targets for diagnosis, treatment and viral suppression set by the United Nations are met.  

And that’s where an HIV vaccine comes in.

Jan Medlock, the study’s lead author, said adding a vaccine to the mix — even one that is only 50 percent effective — by 2020 could prevent another 6.3 million new infections, potentially reversing the HIV pandemic.

“Partial efficacy is still better than zero efficacy, and it really becomes (a matter) of thinking about the cost and trade-off,” she said. “Are you taking away money from treatment or some other health program to buy these vaccines?  If not, then they’re probably worth doing, even at very low efficacy.”

Medlock’s model — reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — input clinical data from a vaccine that’s now in large-scale trials in South Africa.  

Until it was modified for the phase-three trial in the hopes of boosting its effectiveness, the vaccine candidate showed about a 60 percent efficacy in preventing infection for the first year. The effectiveness dropped to 31 percent 3½ years later.

Even without an improvement in current levels of HIV detection and treatment globally, a vaccine that’s only 50 percent effective has the potential to avert 17 million new cases during the next two decades, Medlock said.

Medlock added an even less effective vaccine could make a sizeable dent to slow the pandemic.

“Twenty percent efficacy at the global population scale is still going to prevent several million infections,” she said.

Medlock said many countries will inevitably fall short of the U.N.’s ambitious goals to contain the HIV pandemic.  

That’s why researchers believe the firepower of imperfect HIV vaccines should be brought to bear in the fight against the AIDS virus.
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Wastewater from households, industries and agriculture should not be seen as a problem but a valuable resource which could help meet the demands for water, energy and nutrients from a growing global population, a U.N. water expert said.

Globally, more than 80 percent of wastewater is released into rivers and lakes without treatment with a negative impact on health and the environment, according to the 2017 U.N. World Water Development Report published on Wednesday.

Pollution from human and animal waste affects nearly one in three rivers in Latin America, Asia and Africa, putting millions of lives at risk, it said.

But wastewater contains nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrates which can be turned into fertilizer, said Richard Connor, editor-in-chief of the report.

Treated sludge can be turned into biogas that could power wastewater treatment plants or be sold on the market, he added.

“Wastewater itself is a valuable resource, even the term wastewater is an oxymoron,” Connor told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“We need to stop seeing it as a burden to be dealt with. It’s not a waste and should not be a waste, especially in this world of water scarcity,” he said by phone from Perugia.

With the world’s population expected to grow by one third to more than 9 billion by 2050, the world will need 55 percent more water and 70 percent more energy, the United Nations says.

Population growth will also lead to a 70 percent increase in demand for food, putting more pressure on water through farming, which is already the biggest consumer of water.

More people also means more wastewater, including from sanitation, which governments have pledged to improve as part of development goals agreed by U.N. member states in 2015.

Increased wastewater is one of the biggest challenges associated with the growth of informal settlements in rapidly expanding cities in developing countries, the report said.

Connor said even though wastewater is a valuable resource, what often stops governments from investing in treatment plants is the cost while what puts people off using it is the “yuck factor”.

Yet the International Space Station has been using the same water for 17 years, Connor noted.

“One morning it’s tea, by the afternoon it’s pee and then the next morning somebody is shaving with it,” he said.

A solution for governments is to invest in smaller, decentralized treatment systems, which cost a fraction of conventional plants and require less maintenance, Connor said.

He added that not all water needs to be treated to drinking water quality but to a level where it is safe to use by industries, municipalities, agriculture or for cooling in power plants.

“You go for what’s affordable and design the level of treatment according to your needs,” Connor said.

“The key word is ‘fit for purpose treatment’.”
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Thirty-three of Europe’s most polluted cities are in Poland. Part of the reason: in winter, people keep warm by burning coal. Northern China has a similar problem. And it’s a big problem. Burning coal pours particulate matter into the atmosphere, which contributes to global warming and significant health problems. But some simple technology may help reduce the problem. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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The cost for individual homes in the U.S. to “go solar” has dropped by more than 60 percent over the last decade.

Those low costs helped convince more than a million Americans to install solar panels on their roofs.

Now schools are beginning to get in on the benefits. One of them is the school system in Fremont, Indiana.

The residents of this small town in America’s upper Midwest have always relied on the sun to warm their fields and draw tourists to their lakes. Now school superintendent William Stitt said they’re counting on it to power their schools.

“The technology has advanced so much in the last couple of years that it’s become more energy efficient, more cost effective for schools to get solar energy,” Stitt said.

Start-up cost

Construction of the solar project will cost $3 million. But when finished, it will completely power the elementary, middle and high school buildings. It may generate so much electricity, that the school will be able to sell some back to the power company at a profit.

The system will work through several rows of 3,000-4,000 panels each. They will be located in a special 2.5 hectare solar field behind the middle school.

The district has to lease the equipment from the local power company for 20 years, at a fixed rate.

But Kim Quick, facility director, said that even with that added cost, the schools should save money because the panels should last 40 years.

“[It] is going to cost us approximately the same amount we’re paying for utilities today. So that cost is never going to increase for the next 20 years,” Quick said. “So if the power company comes in next year and says, ‘We want to increase utilities 6 percent,’ we’re going to pay the same we’re paying today 20 years from now.”

Free electricity, eventually

In 20 years, the school district will own the equipment outright, meaning it won’t pay anything for electricity.

Since the panels are always “on,” Quick said the district will save additional money by banking the unused electricity that’s generated when school is not in session.

“These work year-round. Even in a full moon they will produce electricity,” he said.

Just 3 percent of the nation’s 125,000 schools use some form of solar energy. While not all can use solar power cost-effectively, a recent report by the Solar Foundation found that 72,000 US schools could save money with solar.

Schools could install panels on their roofs or elevate a field of panels over a parking lot. Those innovations would save most schools an average of $1 million over 30 years.

Educational component

Going solar also offers schools an educational component. It provides teachers opportunities to incorporate lessons in science, technology, engineering, and math into the curriculum.

All three schools in the Fremont system will have a live display module that kids can visit daily to learn how much energy is being used and saved.

If all goes according to plan, Fremont School District’s new solar field will be up and running by mid-summer. Superintendent Stitt is already looking further ahead.

“I’d love the community and the kids in 40 years to go, ‘Man, they made a great decision 40 years ago by creating this solar project!’ ” he said.
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The biggest construction project in Europe is taking place beneath the British capital, London.

The largely subterranean Crossrail route linking Heathrow airport to the eastern financial district and beyond is designed to ease congestion as London’s population grows; but, it has also unearthed a trove of archaeological finds that provide a fascinating window on eight thousand years of the city’s history.

“The great thing about the Crossrail project is that it’s allowed us to basically sort of take a slice through London. We’ve been amazed at the quantity, tens of thousands of artifacts,” said Jackie Keily, curator of “The Archaeology of Crossrail” exhibition at the Museum of London – itself housed in a 200-year-old shipping warehouse in the old docks next to the River Thames.

Among the highlights is a bronze medallion dating from the year 245 AD, when southern Britain was ruled by the Romans.

“It would have been given by the emperor to a high-ranking official, probably in Rome. And it’s quite fascinating that it’s traveled right across the Empire to be here in London,” Keily said.

Nearby, a glass case contains a dozen carefully worked metal discs. These “hipposandals” were an early form of horse shoe designed to aid pack animals as they negotiated the rain-soaked streets of Roman London.

Many of the finds hint at macabre rituals. Hundreds of skulls were found beneath what is now the financial heart of London. Could the victims have been executed and put on display as a warning? Were they the losers of gladiatorial battles at the nearby Roman amphitheater?

One of the most striking exhibits is the decapitated skeleton of a Roman woman found buried beneath what is now Liverpool Street station. The skull is placed between the leg bones.

“To have placed the head between the legs one feels was almost certainly sending some sort of message, either about the person or was some kind of ritual associated with the burial,” Keily said.

The Crossrail route tunnels through several graveyards, many dating to major disease outbreaks such as the “Black Death” in the mid-1300s. That plague pandemic wiped out much of London’s population and killed an estimated 1.5 million people across Britain.

Despite the panic that swept across Europe at the time, archaeologists have noted that burials appear to have been conducted with as much dignity as possible. There are few mass graves and most burial sites were dug in an orderly fashion. Some held up to 20,000 bodies.

Lighter aspects of London life are also on display: a bowling ball found in the moat of a 16th century manor house, perhaps lost beneath the murky water during a high society summer party. Laws prevented lower class peasants from partaking in such revelry.

A collection of leather shoes has survived five centuries buried in the London mud. Some are plain with rounded toes, patched up and well worn. Others appear to have barely been used, their tapering ends suggestive of the modern stiletto heel.

“So very fashionable shoes that Londoners were wearing. It connects us in a way with people in the past,” Keily noted.

Despite the painstaking archaeological work each time something new is unearthed, construction of Crossrail remains on schedule. The first trains are due to take passengers through the tunnels in late 2018.
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Animal testing has become problematic in the past few decades. Animal rights activists have uncovered numerous instances of animal cruelty, and it’s also expensive to keep animal test subjects, especially if they’re treated humanely. But how else can pharmaceutical companies test the effectiveness, and safety of their products, some of which could save thousands of lives? The answer to that problem may be wriggling in a laboratory petri dish. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Fifty thousand Haitians will have access to quality health care for the first time after a modern new hospital opened Monday in the isolated and impoverished Cotes-de-Fer region.

The Bishop Joseph M. Sullivan Center for Health will serve those who, until now, had to travel for hours on rough roads for treatment.

The new hospital is a project of the nonprofit charity Catholic Medical Mission Board. The U.S.- based group Mercy Health contributed $2 million for construction costs.

“With active involvement of the community and an emphasis on training and knowledge sharing, the health center will strengthen the local health system in a long-term and sustainable way,” said CMMB’s director in Haiti, Dr. Dianne Jean-Francois.

Along with an emergency room and pharmacy, the new hospital will give pregnant women a place to deliver their babies, along with postnatal and pediatric care.

The hospital also has plans for expansion for dental and ophthalmology clinics.
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An experimental anti-malaria vaccine has been developed that protects against more than one strain of the malaria parasite that causes the mosquito-borne illness.  

The vaccine, tested by principal investigator Kirsten Lyke and colleagues, is called PfSPZ and uses whole, live weakened early versions of the most common form of malaria Plasmodium falciparum (P. Falciparum), called sporozoites.

This early form of the parasite is what’s first injected into humans by an infected mosquito.  

By using the entire sporozoite in the vaccine, the immune system responds to more of the parasite, according to Lyke.

15 healthy adults tested

A study of the vaccine conducted by Lyke and colleagues, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, enrolled 15 healthy adults who were assigned to receive three doses of the vaccine over several months.  

Nineteen weeks after receiving the final dose, the volunteers were exposed to bites of mosquitoes carrying one strain of parasite from Africa.

A second group of six controls that was not vaccinated also got exposed to the mosquitoes. They showed signs of malaria and were promptly treated.

Nine of 14 vaccinated participants, or 64 percent, showed no signs of infection after exposure.  

Of the nine, six participants were selected and exposed to a different strain, 33 weeks after the final immunization.

This time, five of the six were protected against this second strain, according to Lyke.

‘Great’ is not good enough

“Which is great, but not good enough,” said Lyke. “I mean, you don’t want to take a vaccine that’s going to give you a two out of three chance of being protected. So we have to improve on that and get it up to as close to 100 percent as we can. But at least we’ve established that we can get very high protection in six months and we’re seeing cross-strain protection.”

The agent would offer broader protection against a disease that kills mostly young children in sub-Saharan Africa.  

According to the World Health Organization, 212 million people were infected with the mosquito-carrying parasite in 2015, and 429,000 died.  

There are four types of malaria parasite that typically infect people. The most common and deadly is Plasmodium falciparum, which goes through a number of life-cycle stages during which the parasite evolves into a different form.  

That is what makes it difficult to develop a vaccine.  

Multiple strains a problem

The problem is further complicated by the fact that P. falciparum can mutate and develop into multiple strains.

Lyke said this is particularly true in Africa, in places where the disease is common.

“The falciparum malaria that is so endemic, there’s a lot of genetic change that occurs because it’s so prevalent in the population. And that contributes to different strains of the falciparum malaria so that you know any vaccine that we’d want to introduce we would want to make sure that it broadly covers multiple different strains of falciparum malaria,” Lyke said.

Clinical trials of the early vaccine, produced by the company Sanaria, also are going on in Africa, including in Burkina Faso, Kenya and Bioko Island off of Africa’s west coast.
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Tanzania has announced a plan to send 500 doctors to Kenya after a doctors’ strike paralyzed health services in the neighboring country for months. Kenyan doctors, however, say the government should not hire any foreign doctors but instead employ the more than 1,000 trained physicians who are unemployed.

Tanzanian President John Magufuli announced the plan to dispatch the doctors after a recent meeting in Dar es Salaam with a visiting Kenyan delegation that included Kenya’s health cabinet secretary, Cleopa Mailu.

Mailu said this was a deal that would benefit both countries.

“We have so many government health centers that need doctors,” said Mailu. “Yes, we have doctors in our country; we recently had a doctors’ strike and one of their reasons for their strike was that there were not enough doctors to attend to patients. The doctors were spending a lot of hours attending to the patients.”

Doctors from public hospitals in Kenya went on strike last December to demand a pay raise and improved working conditions for physicians and patients.

A deal struck by the doctors’ union and the government opened the way to negotiations that ended the 100-day-old strike.

According to Mailu, it is because of the doctors’ demands that the push to recruit foreign physicians was realized.

“There is so much work and we will continue looking for more doctors; we will continue negotiations with the government to see if they will provide us with more doctors so that we can strengthen our health services here in Kenya,” said Mailu.

Dr. Elly Nyaim of the Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Board says the move may not have been clearly thought out.

“As per the World Health Organization recommendation, we still have a shortage even with the ones we produce from our universities, that state actually cuts across the entire East Africa… so Tanzania is actually even worse off than we are in terms of the doctor-patient ratio,” said Nyaim.

The physician’s union says Kenya currently has 1,400 doctors who have not been absorbed into the workforce.

Low doctor-to-patient ratio

According to the World Health organization, the Tanzanian doctor-to-patient ratio stands at 1 doctor for every 20,000 patients. In Kenya, it’s 1 doctor for every 16,000. The recommended doctor-patient ratio is one to 300.

“It would be very unfortunate that you are actually exporting when you do not have enough yourself; it should not be done at the expense of denying qualified Kenyans positions because you are bringing foreigners,” said Nyaim.

In a press briefing held after the meeting with the Kenyan delegation, Tanzania’s president welcomed the new deal with the Kenyan government.

“By good luck our friends have said they will pay good salaries and the payment will be in dollars. They will be given accommodation and security,” said Magufuli.

Health Secretary Mailu says the Tanzanian doctors will start working in Kenya in April and will be given two to three-year contracts.

And he says there are plan underway to also hire doctors from Cuba.

 
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Would you drink beer made from toilet water?

The brewers at one popular brewery in California are betting you would.

Stone Brewing of San Diego unveiled a new beer made from water that “comes from the toilet,” according to ABC 10 News in San Diego.

Granted, the water for the brew, called Full Circle Pale Ale, is not made from water directly from the toilet, but it does use recycled water from the Pure Water San Diego program, the channel reported.

At the unveiling of the new beer Thursday, San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer called the beer “delicious,” while Stone’s senior manager of brewing and innovation, Steve Gonzalez, said it was among the best pale ales the brewery he has ever made.

Gonzalez told News 10 drinkers would “get some caramel notes, some tropical fruit notes. It’s a very clean tasting beer.”

According to News 10, some attendees at the unveiling were a little sceptical of the beer, but after a taste, they were converted.

“[I thought] that it would have an off taste or be something different to it … it’s outstanding,” Shane Trussell said.

The beer is not yet available to the public, but the brewery said it would be soon.

The Pure Water San Diego program aims to supply one-third of San Diego’s water supply through recycled wastewater.
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