Pakistan is registering approximately 20,000 new HIV infections annually, the highest rate of increase among all countries in the region, warns the World Health Organization (WHO).

The international body says mortality among Pakistanis living with the virus, which causes the deadly AIDS disease, is also rising, in spite of the availability of lifesaving antiretroviral therapy.

The latest government figures show that only 16 percent of the estimated 150,000 people living with HIV had been tested and only 9 percent have access to lifesaving treatment.

“The remaining 135,000 people are walking around in the communities as carriers of (HIV) infection who are ready to transmit infections to those who are not infected, even to their unborn babies,” Dr. Saima Paracha of the National AIDS Control Program, told VOA.

Officials say the HIV epidemic in Pakistan remains largely concentrated among the key populations, including people who inject drugs, the transgender community, sex workers and their clients and men who have sex with men.

“The drivers of infection are now the sexual networks and they are ready to spill the infection into the general public,” Dr. Paracha cautioned.

Paracha says the Pakistani government offers free HIV testing and treatment, but she notes the marginalized key populations continue face widespread stigma and discrimination in the society.

The fear of maltreatment, and punitive actions by law enforcers impacts the willingness of these populations to pursue testing, which remains a major challenge facing national efforts to treat and prevent the spread of HIV, she lamented.

Official estimates show that Pakistan has seen a 45 percent increase in new HIV infections since 2010.

“The number of new HIV infections will continue to increase dramatically if implementation rates of intervention remain at current levels,” said Dr. Nima Saeed Abid, country head of WHO.

An official statement issued in connection with World AIDS Day quoted him as saying that Pakistan has the lowest rate of all regional countries in diagnosing people who are infected and linking them to care and treatment.

Naila Bashir, who heads the HIV treatment center at Islamabad’s Pakistan Institute of Medical Sciences (PIMS), told VOA the facility receives up to 40 new HIV patients every month, underscoring the alarming increase in the number of infections.

The center was established in 2005 and the number of patients has since increased from 22 to more than 3,000, including men, women and children of all ages, said Dr. Bashir.

HIV has never been a priority program in the national health system and the recent abolition of the federal health ministry and the devolution of its functions to the provinces, which lacked preparedness and capacity, have led to the increase in infections, say WHO experts in the country. However, they acknowledge the new government of Prime Minister Imran Khan is giving priority to tackling health emergencies in Pakistan, including HIV.

Federal Minister for National Health Services Regulation and Coordination, Aamir Mehmood Kiyani, says the government is working on a strategy to remove barriers and challenges in protecting people from HIV infections.

Kiyani told a seminar in Islamabad that since taking office three months ago, the government has moved to established 12 new HIV treatment centers while overall 33 such facilities have been working throughout Pakistan.

U.N. officials say the Pakistan government urgently needs to redouble efforts to “de-stigmatize HIV testing, advocate for confidential, non-discriminatory, community based care models and raise awareness about disease transmission, prevention treatment” to achieve reductions in new infections in affected populations.
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Negotiators from around the world began two weeks of talks on curbing climate change Sunday, three years after sealing a landmark deal in Paris that set a goal of keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

Envoys from almost 200 nations gathered in Poland’s southern city of Katowice, a day earlier than originally planned, for the U.N. meeting that’s scheduled to run until Dec. 14.

Ministers and some heads of government are joining in Monday, when host Poland will push for a joint declaration to ensure a “just transition” for fossil fuel industries like coal producers who are facing closures as part of efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The meeting received a boost over the weekend, after 19 major economies at the G-20 summit affirmed their commitment to the 2015 Paris climate accord. The only holdout was the United States, which announced under President Donald Trump that it is withdrawing from the climate pact.

“Despite geopolitical instability, the climate consensus is proving highly resilient,” said Christiana Figueres, a former head of the U.N. climate office.

“It is sad that the federal administration of the United States, a country that is increasingly feeling the full force of climate impacts, continues to refuse to listen to the objective voice of science when it comes to climate change,” Figures said.

She cited a recent expert report warning of the consequences of letting average global temperatures rise beyond 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F).

“The rest of the G-20 have not only understood the science, they are taking actions to both prevent the major impacts and strengthen their economies,” said Figueres, who now works with Mission 2020, a group that campaigns to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The meeting in Katowice is regarded as a key test of countries’ willingness to back their lofty but distant goals with concrete measures, some of which are already drawing fierce protests . At the top of the agenda is the so-called Paris rulebook , which will determine how governments record and report their greenhouse emissions and efforts to cut them.

Separately, negotiators will discuss ramping up countries’ national emissions targets after 2020, and financial support for poor nations that are struggling to adapt to climate change.

The shift away from fossil fuels, which scientists say has to happen by 2050, is expected to require a major overhaul of world economies.

“The good news is that we do know a lot of what we need to be able to do to get there,” said David Waskow of the World Resources Institute.

Waskow, who has followed climate talks for years, said despite the Trump administration’s refusal to back this global effort the momentum is going in the right direction.

“It’s not one or two players anymore in the international arena,” he said. “It’s what I think you could call a distributed leadership, where you have a number of countries — some of them small or medium-sized — really making headway and doing it in tandem with cities and states and businesses.”

Later Sunday, protests were planned by environmental activists calling for an end to coal mining in Poland, which gets some 80 percent of its energy from coal. Katowice is at the heart of Poland’s coal mining region of Silesia and there are still several active mines in and around the city.

On Saturday, thousands of people marched in Berlin and Cologne to demand that Germany speed up its exit from coal-fired power plants.
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The World Bank has announced it is doubling its funding to help poor nations adjust to global warming to $200 billion over five years.

“If we don’t reduce emissions and build adaption now, we’ll have 100 million more people living in poverty by 2030,” the bank’s climate change chief John Roome told the French News Agency.

“And we also know that the less we address this issue proactively in just three regions – Africa, South Asia, and Latin America – we’ll have 133 million climate migrants, Roone cautioned.”

Helping poorer nations adapt to a warmer environment and the weather extremes that come with it include building sturdier homes, finding new sources of fresh water, and what the bank calls “climate smart agriculture.”

The bank’s announcement comes as delegates from 200 countries started a two week-long climate change conference in Katowice, Poland.

The threat posed by global warming “has never been worse,” U.N. climate chief Patricia Espinosa said Sunday.

The threat posed by global warming “has never been worse,” U.N. climate chief Patricia Espinosa said at the start of climate talks in Poland.

“This year is likely to be one of the four hottest years on record. Climate change impacts have never been worse. This reality is telling us that we need to much more,” she said Sunday.

Negotiators from nearly 200 nations are in the southern Polish city of Katowice for two weeks of talks on implementing the landmark 2015 Paris Accord. Signatories to that agreement pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions and limit the rise in global temperatures to less than two degrees Celsius by 2030.

“Looking from the outside perspective, it’s an impossible task,” Poland’s Deputy Environment Minister Michal Kurtyka told the Associated Press last week.

“The United Nations secretary-general is counting on all of us to deliver. There is no ‘Plan B'”

The climate change talks got a boost when 19 of 20 G-20 nations meeting in Buenos Aires reaffirmed their commitment to fighting climate change.

The United States was the only holdout. President Donald Trump has threatened to pull the U.S. out of the Paris agreement because of what he says is the economic damage the treaty’s provisions would cause.

Trump is a promoter of fossil fuels and nuclear power and has proposed renegotiating the Paris Accord – an idea many dismiss as impractical.

Host country Poland is expected to propose what it calls a “just transition” for the oil, gas, and coal industries to ease the financial blow from the move away from such polluting sources of energy.

Negotiators are also expected to put forth plans to help developing nations adapt to a warming climate.

 
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Teacher Rishi Rawat has one student who is not human, but a machine.

Lessons take place at a lab inside the University of Southern California’s (USC) Clinical Science Center in Los Angeles, where Rawat teaches artificial intelligence, or AI.

To help the machine learn, Rawat feeds the computer samples of cancer cells.

“They’re like a computer brain, and you can put the data into them and they will learn the patterns and the pattern recognition that’s important to making decisions,” he explained.

AI may soon be a useful tool in health care and allow doctors to understand biology and diagnose disease in ways that were never humanly possible.

​Doctors not going away

“Machines are not going to take the place of doctors. Computers will not treat patients, but they will help make certain decisions and look for things that the human brain can’t recognize these patterns by itself,” said David Agus, USC’s professor of medicine and biomedical engineering, director at the Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine, and director at the university’s Center for Applied Molecular Medicine.

Rawat is part of a team of interdisciplinary scientists at USC who are researching how AI and machine learning can identify complex patterns in cells and more accurately identify specific types of breast cancer tumors.

Once a confirmed cancerous tumor is removed, doctors still have to treat the patient to reduce the risk of recurrence. The type of treatment depends on the type of cancer and whether the tumor is driven by estrogen. Currently, pathologists would take a thin piece of tissue, put it on a slide, and stain with color to better see the cells.

“What the pathologist has to do is to count what percentage of the cells are brown and what percentage are not,” said Dan Ruderman, a physicist who is also assistant professor of research medicine at USC.

The process could take days or even longer. Scientists say artificial intelligence can do something better than just count cells. Through machine learning, it can recognize complicated patterns on how the cells are arranged, with the hope, in the near future of making a quick and more reliable diagnosis that is free of human error.

“Are they disordered? Are they in a regular spacing? What’s going on exactly with the arrangement of the cells in the tissue,” described Ruderman of the types of patterns a machine can detect.

“We could do this instantaneously for almost no cost in the developing world,” Agus said.

​Computing power improves

Scientists say the time is ripe for the marriage between computer science and cancer research.

“All of a sudden, we have the computing power to really do it in real time. We have the ability of scanning a slide to high enough resolution so that the computer can see every little feature of the cancer. So it’s a convergence of technology. We couldn’t have done this, we didn’t have the computing power to do this several years ago,” Agus said.

Data is key to having a machine effectively do its job in medicine.

“Once you start to pool together tens and hundreds of thousands of patients and that data, you can actually [have] remarkable new insight, and so AI and machine learning is allowing that. It’s enabling us to go to the next level in medicine and really take that art to new heights,” Agus said.

Back at the lab, Rawat is not only feeding the computer more cell samples, he also designs and writes code to ensure that the algorithm has the ability to learn features unique to cancer cells.

The research now is on breast cancer, but doctors predict artificial intelligence will eventually make a difference in all forms of cancer and beyond.
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With the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning, doctors may soon have new ways of diagnosing and treating patients in ways that were never humanly possible. Scientists at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles are developing a way of using machine learning to identify specific types of breast cancer tumors, and they say it’s just the beginning of what the computer can do. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee has the details from Los Angeles.
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