Jamie Margolin had not expected to be sitting in her bedroom right now.  
The high school senior had prom and graduation coming up, but so much more: A multi-state bus campaign with fellow climate activists. A tour for her new book. Attendance at one of the massive marches that had been planned this week for the 50th anniversary of Earth Day.  
Then the pandemic arrived in Seattle, her hometown, and her plans went out the window.
“But still so much to do,” Margolin said, perched in front of her computer for a video interview from that bedroom.  
Like many other young activists who’ve helped galvanize what’s become a global climate movement, Margolin is not letting a spreading virus stop her. They are organizing in place, from the United States to Ecuador, Uganda, India and beyond.  
And while some fear they’ve lost some momentum in the pandemic, they are determined to keep pushing — and for now, to use technology to their advantage.
Unable to gather en masse as they’d planned this Earth Day, these activists are planning livestreams and webinars to keep the issue of climate front and center on the world stage and in the U.S. presidential race.
One event, Earth Day Live, is being organized by a coalition of youth-led climate groups, including Zero Hour, of which Margolin is a leader (her Twitter profile includes the tag #futurepotus). As is the case with many other young climate activists, she got involved in the movement taking aim at the fossil fuel industry well before Sweden’s Greta Thunberg became a global household name.
Online organizing is not as easy in some countries. In Uganda, activist Mulindwa Moses says only about a third of the population has Wi-Fi. Also under lockdown, the 23-year-old graduate student is waiting for his chance to return to planting trees and speaking to his nation’s youth in person.
Like the original founders of Earth Day, he is among those who were first inspired by local issues — which they came to connect with global climate change.
While traveling in eastern Uganda, Moses met with families who had lost their homes in mudslides caused by torrential rainfall.  
“I remember a girl I had a conversation with — she lost her parents and had to take care of her siblings. She was suffering so much,” he said.
So, last year, he began a campaign to encourage citizens to plant “two trees a week” and regrow their forests to combat deforestation and mudslides exacerbated by changing weather patterns.
In Ecuador, 18-year-old Helena Gualinga also has had to pause her world travels.
Born in Ecuador’s indigenous Kichwa-speaking Sarayaku community — home to about 1,200 people in the Amazon — she says she learned from the example of her parents and her elders how to speak up for the rights of her people. Their fight has been against a government that they believe has given their land too freely to mining and oil companies.
“The energy I remember from my elders growing up” — at community meetings she attended with her parents when she was small — “was that my community was always very worried,” she said.
Now, she added, “I know I have a voice.”
Moses plans to run for his country’s parliament next year. “I want to fight to change the system from the inside,” he said.
So does Max Prestigiacomo, a freshman at the University of Wisconsin, who is set to take his seat on the city council of Madison, Wisconsin. While fighting the coronavirus has used up much of local government’s bandwidth, he still plans this fall to push the platform on which he ran – for his city to become fully sustainable by 2030. It is a lofty and some would say unattainable goal, but he is looking for “the impossible yes.”
“Obviously, I wanted the alarm sounded decades ago before I was even born,” the 18-year-old said. “But it’s too late for incremental change.”
Tia Nelson, daughter of the late Sen. Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, founder of Earth Day, said her father would appreciate the determination of this generation, as he did the young people who made the first Earth Day in 1970 a great success.
Though the senator went to Washington in 1963, and won support from President Kennedy, his daughter said it took several years to find backing for many of his environmental causes. He came up with the idea of Earth Day, first envisioned as a nationwide “teach-in,” after reading a magazine article about college students’ impact on U.S. involvement in Vietnam.  
Later that same year, the Environmental Protection Agency was born.
“The climate youth movement today is having a significant and important impact in doing exactly what my father had hoped on the first Earth Day — that he would get a public demonstration sufficiently robust to shake the political establishment out of their lethargy,” Tia Nelson said. “The youth movement 50 years ago did that. The youth movement today around climate change is doing the same thing.”
Nelson, who is climate director at the Wisconsin-based Outrider Foundation, said she’s particularly excited at polls showing that many young Republicans care just as much about climate change as Democrats.
Peter Nicholson, who helps lead Foresight Prep, a summer environmental justice program at Chicago’s Loyola University, said the coronavirus crisis only highlights the message that “we are all connected.”
“Climate change is no less real,” he said. “The feedback loop is just much longer.”
So for now, Margolin and her peers will use their devices to help foster those connections — something their predecessors could not do remotely.
“Everyone is online anyway,” she said. “Maybe they start on Earth Day. But then with online resources, you click one link that leads you to another, leads to another that leads you to contact info.”
“And then you just start getting involved.”
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As residents at a nursing home in Kirkland, Washington, began dying in late February from a coronavirus outbreak that would eventually take 43 lives, there was little sign of trouble at the Cobble Hill Health Center, a 360-bed facility in an upscale section of Brooklyn.  
Its Facebook page posted a cheerful story encouraging relatives to quiz their aging loved ones about their lives, and photos of smiling third graders at a nearby school making flower arrangements for residents.  
That quickly changed. By the middle of March, the CEO began sending increasingly alarmed emails about banning visitors, screening staff, confining residents, wiping down all surfaces, and having all-hands-on-deck meetings to prepare everyone for the coming coronavirus “freight train.”
“I’ll be darned if I’m not going to do everything in my power to protect them,” Donny Tuchman wrote before things got worse. More than 100 staffers, nearly a third of the workforce, went out sick. Those left began wearing garbage bags because of a shortage of protective gear. Not a single resident has been able to get tested for the virus to this day.
Now listed with 55 deaths it can only assume were caused by COVID-19, among the most of any such facility in the country, Cobble Hill Health Center has become yet another glaring example of the nation’s struggle to control the rapid spread of the coronavirus in nursing homes that care for the most frail and vulnerable.
Cobble Hill’s grim toll surpasses not only Kirkland’s but the 49 deaths at a home outside of Richmond, Virginia, 48 dead at a veteran’s home in Holyoke, Mass., and five other homes in outer boroughs of New York City that have at least 40 deaths each.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said Monday that the situation at Cobble Hill and other nursing homes in the city where the virus has claimed many lives shows that “something really has not worked out the right way.”  
“It’s horrifying and it kind of reminds you this crisis has taken us places you could not have imagined in modern America where so many people have been vulnerable,” De Blasio said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”. “But it’s also a warning of: you cannot pretend that this ferocious disease is simply going to walk away at one point or just flick a switch and it’s gone.”
Out of an Associated Press tally of 8,003 nursing home deaths nationwide, a third of them are in New York state.
AP interviews with friends and relatives who have visited the Cobble Hill Health Center in recent weeks, as well as the home’s own statements, paint a picture of a facility overwhelmed and unequipped to deal with its coronavirus outbreak, with shortages of staff, personal protective equipment and the availability of reliable testing.
“They were under siege,” said Daniel Arbeeny, who brought his ailing 88-year-old father from a hospital to the home in late March. “They were doing the best they could, as far as we could tell at arm’s length, under siege.”
Tuchman told the AP on Sunday that he believes many other homes have more deaths than Cobble Hill but his has been singled out for its honesty. He said it responded to the state’s voluntary survey with cases in which it was “possible” COVID-19 could be a factor, since his home wasn’t able to test any due to the lack of available kits. He also said he reported 50 deaths, not 55, though the state repeated that tally Sunday.
“There’s been a lot of lip service about how vulnerable nursing homes have been, and everyone has the best intentions, but it didn’t materialize,” Tuchman said. “The PPE didn’t materialize, the staffing surge didn’t materialize, the testing didn’t materialize. … How did we expect this not to spread?”
Though Tuchman doesn’t know for sure how the virus got into Cobble Hill, he noted there has been a parade of paramedics and staffers allowed into the building each day who were screened with health questions and temperature checks, not enough to keep out those who are sick but not showing symptoms.
Soon after news broke of Cobble Hill’s death toll, Steven Vince went there to talk to administrators about his recently passed uncle, whose death certificate listed him possibly having COVID. An administrator told him they were confident his uncle did not have the virus.
“It’s very surprising because I don’t think anyone from the facility contacted us to tell us anything like this or basically bring this to our attention in any way,” he said.
Eva Buchmuller, a New York City artist whose best friend has lived in Cobble Hill with Alzheimer’s for three years, said she wasn’t that surprised the virus spread in the nursing home’s cramped quarters, with small rooms tightly packed along narrow corridors and residents not allowed to open windows. She believes it’s highly likely her friend is infected.
“How could you avoid not getting the virus?” she said, adding that it’s not overcrowded but “always, always filled up.”  
Built in a stately brick building that once was a 19th-century hospital, Cobble Hill was most recently rated three out of five stars by the federal government for overall quality and the facility has a complaint rate that’s half that of the statewide average for nursing homes.
Its beds are in high demand — it has 98 percent occupancy, according to the state — in a city that has seen closures in nursing homes that developers have eyed for apartments.
Over the years, it’s shown signs of innovation. It has, at various points, taught massage therapy to nursing assistants, housed a small alternative public high school, brought local artists in to teach residents dance, offered music therapy and was at the forefront of nursing homes setting up Alzheimer’s units and cutting reliance on antipsychotics that can leave residents with dementia.
In early 2018, Cobble Hill boasted on its website that it was hosting a delegation of 18 physicians and hospital administrators from Hubei Province, China — which would become the global epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak — “to see best practices first hand.”  
Earlier this month, Daniel Arbeeny and his family decided to move his elderly father — who was not believed to have COVID-19 — from the Cobble Hill facility to the family’s home on a nearby block. After he left, the family helped coordinate a donation of face shields and doesn’t blame the nursing home for the outbreak or its outcome.  
“To me, it’s just a bad situation,” he said. “They were dealt a bad set of cards.”
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An Ebola flare-up in eastern Congo may spread again after a patient escaped from a clinic, complicating efforts to contain the disease that has infected six people since last week, the World Health Organization said on Sunday.The Democratic Republic of Congo was two days away from declaring the end of the world’s second-largest Ebola epidemic when a new chain of infection was discovered on April 10, following more than seven weeks without a new case.Since then, health authorities have sought to contain any renewed spread of infections.But on Friday a 28-year-old motorbike taxi-driver who had tested positive for Ebola ran away from the center where he was being treated in the town of Beni.”We are using all the options to get him out of the community,” said Boubacar Diallo, deputy incident manager for the WHO’s Ebola response operation. “We are expecting secondary cases from him.”Decades of conflict and poor governance have eroded public trust in authorities in Congo. Despite Ebola having killed more than 2,200 people since August 2018, research shows that many communities believe the disease is not real.Small outbreaks are common towards the end of an epidemic, but health workers need to ensure the virus is contained by tracking, quarantining and vaccinating the contacts of new cases.”We do not have any details yet. All have been working with the authorities, youths and civil society to find him. Search is ongoing,” Diallo said by WhatsApp message.A 15-year-old girl also tested positive for the virus on Friday, Diallo said, taking the total number of confirmed new cases since the flare-up to six.Beni’s deputy mayor Muhindo Bakwanamaha said the local authorities have not so far been able to track down the escaped patient. “Since he is out of treatment he will die, and create a lot of contacts around him,” he said.Two new vaccines have had a major impact in containing Ebola, but militia attacks have prevented health workers from reaching some areas hit by the virus.Congo’s battered health system is simultaneously fighting measles and cholera epidemics, as well as the global coronavirus pandemic. The country has recorded 327 cases of COVID-19 and 25 deaths. 
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The Trump White House has intervened to weaken one of the few public health protections pursued by its own administration, a rule to limit the use of a toxic industrial compound in consumer products, according to communications between the White House and Environmental Protection Agency.The documents show that the White House Office of Management and Budget formally notified the EPA by email last July that it was stepping into the crafting of the rule on the compound, perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, used in nonstick and stain-resistant frying pans, rugs, and countless other consumer products.The White House repeatedly pressed the agency to agree to a major loophole that could allow substantial imports of the PFAS-tainted products to continue, greatly weakening the proposed rule. EPA pushed back on the White House demand for the loophole, known as a “safe harbor” provision for industry.Pushed again in January, the agency responded, “EPA opposes proposing a safe harbor provision, but is open to a neutrally-worded request for comment from the public” on the White House request.A ‘national priority’The rule is one of the few concrete steps that the Trump administration has taken to deal with growing contamination by PFAS industrial compounds. The EPA has declared dating back to 2018 that consumer exposure to the substances was a “national priority” that the agency was confronting “aggressively.”Delaware Sen. Tom Carper, the ranking Democrat on the Environment and Public Works Committee, who obtained the documents revealing the White House intervention, and public-health advocates say the White House action was led by Nancy Beck, a former chemical industry executive now detailed to President Donald Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers.In this image from video, Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., speaks on the Senate floor at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., March 25, 2020.In a letter sent Friday to the EPA, Carper charged the White House pressure amounts to unusual intervention in what had been the EPA’s in-house efforts to regulate imports tainted with the compound. Trump has nominated Beck to lead the Consumer Product Safety Commission, a government panel charged with protecting Americans from harm by thousands of kinds of consumer goods.Asked about the White House actions, EPA spokeswoman Corry Schiermeyer said in an email that “consulting with other federal agencies on actions is a normal process across government,” and that “EPA is often required to engage in an interagency review process led by OMB.””It is routine for the agency to receive input from all of our stakeholders, including our federal partners,” Schiermeyer wrote.The EPA did not respond to a question about whether Beck led the White House intervention. Emails sent for comment to the White House, the White House Office of Management and Budget and Beck were not immediately answered.Carper obtained pages of back-and-forth proposed changes, redline drafts and other communications between the White House Office of Management and Budget, the EPA and others on the draft rule. No authors are listed in many of the final rounds of White House edits, drafts and proposals and EPA’s responses.Carper wrote to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler on Friday to object to the White House push for weakening of the rule, newly revealed in the documents. Carper said it appeared that Beck, who was moved to the White House from a top regulatory job at the Trump EPA, “sought to make it more difficult for EPA to use its authority … to protect Americans from these harmful substances.”Raising the technical barWhile thousands of kinds of PFAS compounds are still in use in the United States, the new EPA rule would set up agency oversight of imports of products that use a few kinds of the compounds that manufacturers agreed to phase out in this country starting in 2006. Those versions remain in production in some parts of the world.In addition to the safe harbor loophole, another change sought by the White House would raise the technical bar for EPA to consider blocking any of the tainted products.The agency agreed to rewrite the rule to include a third White House request, narrowing the range of imported products that would fall under the rule.The official public comment period for the current form of the rule ends Friday, moving the proposal close to crafting of its final form. Congress, impatient for the Trump administration to start bringing the PFAS compounds under federal regulation, has ordered the administration to get a final rule out by mid-summer.Even if the rule goes out in its current form, applying to fewer kinds of product imports, “it would certainly be better than where we are without it,” although “scaled back significantly from what it was originally,” said Richard Denison, lead senior scientist at the Environmental Defense Fund advocacy group, and a longtime monitor of the EPA’s regulation of toxic substances.But if the final rule includes the other two key changes being pushed by the White House “it could even do more damage than good,” Denison said.Industries also would be likely to push for those two exceptions in regulations of future substances, Denison said. “Those two provisions would establish precedence that the EPA has never used for 40 years.”Array of health problemsIndustries produce thousands of versions of the man-made compounds. They are used in countless products, including nonstick cookware, water-repellent sports gear, cosmetics, and grease-resistant food packaging, along with firefighting foams.Public health studies on exposed populations have associated them with an array of health problems, including some cancers, and weakened immunity. The advent of widespread testing for the contaminant over the past few years found it in high levels in many public water systems around the country. The administration initially sought in 2018 to suppress a federal toxicology warning on the danger of the compounds, then publicly vowed action.
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NASA announced on Friday that a SpaceX rocket would  send two American astronauts to the International Space Station on May 27, the first crewed spaceflight from the U.S. in nearly a decade.”On May 27, @NASA will once again launch American astronauts on American rockets from American soil!” NASA chief Jim Bridenstine said in a tweet.The astronauts will be sent to the ISS on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.Astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley will be launched to the ISS aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft. They will lift off at 4:32 p.m. (2032 GMT) from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA said.Since July 2011, the United States has relied on Russian Soyuz rockets to send U.S. astronauts to the ISS.
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South Africa’s 21-day coronavirus lockdown presents an unusual challenge for a nation with the world’s highest burden of HIV.  In order to remain healthy, those on antiretrovirals need to venture out of their homes for their lifesaving medication — a move that puts them at greater risk of contracting the highly infectious coronavirus.Therefore, some health care advocates are seeking broader use of an existing workaround in the form of automatic pharmaceutical dispensaries, much like ATMs, where patients can get their pills without making human contact.
 
Already, South African hospitals are busy preparing for a coming storm of coronavirus cases, which officials expect to peak in September.  
 
But as they stare down this pandemic, they’re also dealing with at least 7.7 million HIV patients, already supported by one of the world’s largest free government-sponsored antiretroviral programs.
 
So how, in this age of lockdowns and strict social distancing, can these vulnerable patients stay safe from a new viral threat?
 
Enter the pharmacy ATM.  
 
South African non-profit Right to Care rolled out the innovative program in 2018 to give patients with chronic illnesses a quick virtual consultation with a pharmacist, followed by dispensation of their medication — all in under three minutes. In normal times, the program saves patients the inconvenience of waiting in long lines at government clinics.
 
But during this new pandemic, it could save lives, says pharmacist Taffy Chinamhora.  
 
“The interaction between the patient and health care professional is minimized, is very minimal; it’s more or less virtual from the patient point of view, because it’s via an audiovisual link. So interaction, so the spread of the virus is limited because there is no person-to-person interaction because we’re using audiovisual link, we’re using an ATM pharmacy to dispense medication to patients,” Chinamhora said.The program’s managing director, Fanie Hendriksz, says it could also lift a burden off the nation’s hospitals. Patients can get two months of medication at a time.
 
“In a time like this it’s important that we decant our chronic, stable patients from our overburdened facilities to make way for the side effects of the pandemic,” Hendriksz said.
 
The program has five locations in South Africa, most of them in high-density urban areas in Johannesburg and the city of Bloemfontein. Most are inside shopping malls, which, under South Africa’s strict lockdown conditions that only allow essential trips outside of the home, also minimizes the number of trips patients have to make. Hendriksz says there has already been a spike in the usage of these locations.
 
“We’ve seen a rapid increase in patient numbers at our ATM pharmacies. One of the main reasons for this is just remember that these ATM pharmacies are situated in community shopping centers. So, in a period of lockdown, patients can easily align the collection of their medication with their monthly or weekly shopping. And also, the ATM pharmacy is open seven days a week, and already we are open 80 hours a month more than the public health care facilities,” Hendriksz said.
 
The program is busy collecting data on how many new patients have entered the program. But, they say, every single patient they can help contributes to the larger fight against the coronavirus pandemic.
 
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Two U.S. space agency NASA astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut landed Friday in Kazakhstan after months on board the International Space Station.
 
NASA astronauts Andrew Morgan and Jessica Meir and Russian space agency Roscosmos Cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka undocked from the ISS in the Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft early Friday.
 
Just over three hours later, the trio parachuted to Earth in the steppe of Kazakhstan, outside the remote town of Dzhezkazgan. Following post-landing checks, the three were taken by helicopter to the Russian-owned spaceport in Baikonur.
 
Morgan’s 272-day mission began on July 20, 2019, while Meir and Skripochka left Earth Sept. 25 last year.
 
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A two-decade-long dry spell that has parched much of the western United States is turning into one of the deepest megadroughts in the region in more than 1,200 years, a new study found. And about half of this historic drought can be blamed on man-made global warming, according to a study in Thursday’s journal Science.  Scientists looked at a nine-state area from Oregon and Wyoming down through California and New Mexico, plus a sliver of southwestern Montana and parts of northern Mexico. They used thousands of tree rings to compare a drought that started in 2000 and is still going — despite a wet 2019 — to four past megadroughts since the year 800.  With soil moisture as the key measurement, they found only one other drought that was as big and was likely slightly bigger. That one started in 1575, just 10 years after St. Augustine, the first European city in the United States, was founded, and that drought ended before the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620. FILE – A bathtub ring marks the high water line as a recreational boat approaches Hoover Dam along Black Canyon on Lake Mead near Boulder City, Nev., April 16, 2013.What’s happening now is “a drought bigger than what modern society has seen,” said study lead author A. Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Columbia University. Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist who wasn’t part of the study, called the research important because it provides evidence “that human-caused climate change transformed what might have otherwise been a moderate long-term drought into a severe event comparable to the ‘megadroughts’ of centuries past.” What’s happening is that a natural but moderate drought is being worsened by temperatures that are 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit (1.6 degrees Celsius) hotter than the past and that suck moisture out of the ground, Williams said. It’s much like how clothes and plants dry faster in the warmth of indoors than they do outside, he said. To quantify the role of global warming, researchers used 31 computer models to compare what’s happening now to what would happen in a mythical world without the burning of fossil fuels that spews billions of tons of heat-trapping gases. They found on average that 47% of the drought could be blamed on human-caused climate change. “We’ve been increasingly drifting into a world that’s getting dryer,” Williams said. ‘Megadrought’ titleThere’s debate among scientists over whether this current drought warrants the title “megadrought” because so far it has only lasted two decades and others are at least 28 years long. Climate scientist Clara Deser at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who wasn’t part of the study, said while the research is good, she thinks the deep drought has to last another decade or so to qualify as a “megadrought.”  Williams said he understands the concern and that’s why the study calls it “an emerging megadrought.” “It’s still going on and it’s 21 years long,” Williams said. “This drought looks like one of the worst ones of the last millennium except for the fact that it hasn’t lasted as long.” University of Michigan environment dean Jonathan Overpeck, who studies southwestern climate and was not part of the study, calls it “the first observed multidecadal megadrought in recorded U.S. history.” Wet 2019Although last year was wet, past megadroughts have had wet years and the recent rain and snow was not nearly enough to make up for the deep drought years before, Williams said. The U.S. drought monitor puts much of Oregon, California, Colorado, Utah and Nevada and good chunks of New Mexico, Arizona and Idaho in abnormally dry, moderate or severe drought conditions. Wyoming is the only state Williams studied that doesn’t have large areas of drought.This week, water managers warned that the Rio Grande is forecast to have water flows less than half of normal, while New Mexico’s largest reservoir is expected to top out at about one-third of its 30-year average. This is “what we can expect going forward in a world with continued global warming,” said Stanford University climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh, who wasn’t part of the study.  
 
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The Trump administration is gutting an Obama-era rule that compelled coal plants to cut back emissions of mercury and other human health hazards, limiting future regulation of air pollutants by petroleum and coal plants. Environmental Protection Agency chief Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist whose clients have gotten many of the regulatory rollbacks they asked for from the Trump administration, was set to announce the final version of the weakened rule later Thursday.  Environmental and public health groups and Democratic lawmakers faulted the administration for pressing forward with rollbacks — in the final six months of President Donald Trump’s current term — while the coronavirus pandemic rivets the world’s attention. FILE – Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler speaks at a news conference in Washington, Sept. 12, 2019.With rollbacks on air pollution protections, the “EPA is all but ensuring that higher levels of harmful air pollution will make it harder for people to recover in the long run” from the disease caused by the coronavirus, given the lasting harm the illness does to victims’ hearts and lungs, said Delaware Senator Tom Carper, the senior Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. The EPA left in place standards for emissions of mercury, which has been linked to brain damage and other ailments. But the agency was expected to whittle down the health benefits that regulators can consider in crafting rules, thus challenging the underlying basis for the 2011 Obama administration rule and others like it in the future. The Trump administration contends the mercury cleanup was not “appropriate and necessary,” a legal benchmark under the country’s landmark Clean Air Act, and began work in 2018 to roll back the regulation. It has said the change was needed to provide “regulatory certainty” and more precisely calculates the public health benefit of the rule. The rule change “aims to fix a dishonest accounting mechanism that the last administration used to justify any regulatory action regardless of costs,” Mandy Gunasekara, a Republican policy advocate, told a House committee in February. Gunasekara has since become the EPA’s chief of staff. Many upgrades madeThe Obama rule led to what electric utilities say was an $18 billion cleanup of mercury and other toxins from the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants. EPA staffers’ own analysis said the rule staved off mercury’s devastating neurological damage to children and prevented thousands of premature deaths, among other public health benefits. Most coal-fired power plants have already made the technological upgrades required by the 2011 mercury rule. Many utilities have urged the Trump administration not to go ahead with Thursday’s rollbacks, fearing expensive legal battles will result. Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund advocacy group, said the Obama-era mercury standards already had proved to be “a resounding success,” reducing mercury pollution from coal plants by more than 80 percent. “Thanks to these vital clean air protections, we all have less poison in the air we breathe and the food we eat,” Krupp said in a statement. Coal power plants in this country are the largest single man-made source of mercury pollutants, which enter the food chain through fish and other items that people consume. Coal magnate’s influenceIn 2017, Wheeler, while still a lobbyist, accompanied coal magnate Robert Murray on some of Murray’s calls to new Trump Cabinet members. Murray was pushing a list of desired rollbacks of regulations on coal, as well as asking for major staffing cuts at the EPA and other changes at government boards. Trump and his administration have granted several of Murray’s requests, including scrapping an Obama-era climate change effort that would have encouraged utilities to move to cleaner forms of energy than coal.  Falling, and now plummeting, prices for natural gas and cheaper costs for solar and wind power have made it tough for coal-fired power plants in the U.S. marketplace, leading to drops in coal production and coal energy in the country despite Trump’s rescue efforts.
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Lavina D’Souza hasn’t been able to collect her government-supplied anti-HIV medication since the abrupt lockdown of India’s 1.3 billion people last month during the coronavirus outbreak.
Marooned in a small city away from her home in Mumbai, the medicine she needs to manage her disease has run out. The 43-year-old is afraid that her immune system will crash: “Any disease, the coronavirus or something else, I’ll fall sick faster.”
D’Souza said others also must be “suffering because of the coronavirus without getting infected by it.”
As the world focuses on the pandemic, experts fear losing ground in the long fight against other infectious diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis and cholera that kill millions every year. Also at risk are decadeslong efforts that allowed the World Health Organization to set target dates for eradicating malaria, polio and other illnesses.
With the coronavirus overwhelming hospitals, redirecting medical staff, causing supply shortages and suspending health services, “our greatest fear” is resources for other diseases being diverted and depleted, said Dr. John Nkengasong, head of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.  
That is compounded in countries with already overburdened health care systems, like Sudan. Doctors at Al-Ribat National Hospital in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, shared a document detailing nationwide measures: fewer patients admitted to emergency rooms, elective surgeries indefinitely postponed, primary care eliminated for non-critical cases, and skilled doctors transferred to COVID-19 patients.
Similar scenes are unfolding worldwide. Even in countries with highly developed health care systems, such as South Korea, patients seeking treatment for diseases like TB had to be turned away, said Hojoon Sohn, of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who is based in South Korea.
About 30% of global TB cases — out of 10 million each year — are never diagnosed, and the gaps in care are concentrated in 10 countries with the most infections, Sohn said.
“These are people likely not seeking care even in normal circumstances,” he said. “So with the COVID-19 pandemic resulting in health systems overload, and governments issuing stay-at-home orders, it is highly likely that the number of TB patients who remain undetected will increase.”
In Congo, already overwhelmed by the latest outbreak of Ebola and years of violent conflict, the coronavirus comes as a measles outbreak has killed over 6,000 people, said Anne-Marie Connor, national director for World Vision, a humanitarian aid organization.  
“It’s likely we’ll see a lot of ‘indirect’ deaths from other diseases,” she said.
The cascading impact of the pandemic isn’t limited to treatment. Other factors, like access to transportation during a lockdown, are threatening India’s progress on TB. Patients and doctors can’t get to clinics, and it’s difficult to send samples for testing.
India has nearly a third of the world’s TB cases, and diagnosing patients has been delayed in many areas. Dr. Yogesh Jain in Chhattisgarh — one of India’s poorest states — and other doctors fear that means “TB cases would certainly increase.”  
Coronavirus-related lockdowns also have interrupted the flow of supplies, including critical medicine, protective gear and oxygen, said Dr. Marc Biot, director of operations for international aid group Doctors Without Borders.
“These are difficult to find now because everybody is rushing for them in the same moment,” Biot said.  
The fear of some diseases resurging is further aggravated by delays in immunization efforts for more than 13.5 million people, according to the vaccine alliance GAVI. The international organization said 21 countries are reporting vaccine shortages following border closures and disruptions to air travel — mostly in Africa — and 14 vaccination campaigns for diseases like polio and measles have been postponed.
The Measles & Rubella Initiative said measles immunization campaigns in 24 countries already are delayed, and it fears that more than 117 million children in 37 countries may miss out.
Dr. Jay Wenger, who heads polio eradication efforts for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, said recommending the suspension of door-to-door polio vaccinations was difficult, and while it could lead to a spurt in cases, “it is a necessary move to reduce the risk of increasing transmission of COVID-19.”  
Programs to prevent mosquito-borne diseases also have been hampered. In Sri Lanka, where cases of dengue nearly doubled in 2019 over the previous year, health inspectors are tasked with tracing suspected COVID-19 patients, disrupting their “routine work” of destroying mosquito breeding sites at homes, said Dr. Anura Jayasekara, director of Sri Lanka’s National Dengue Control Unit.  
During a pandemic, history shows that other diseases can make a major comeback. Amid the Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in 2014-16, almost as many people died of HIV, tuberculosis and malaria because of reduced access to health care.  
Rashid Ansumana, a community health expert in Sierra Leone who studied the Ebola outbreak, said the coronavirus’s “impact will definitely be higher.”  
Health providers are trying to ease the crisis by giving months of supplies to people with hepatitis C, HIV and TB, said Biot of Doctors Without Borders.
As countries face difficult health care choices amid the pandemic, Nkengasong of the Africa CDC warns that efforts to tackle other diseases can’t fall by the wayside.  
“The time to advocate for those programs is not when COVID is over. The time is now,” he said.
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