A NASA spacecraft rammed an asteroid at blistering speed Monday in an unprecedented dress rehearsal for the day a killer rock menaces Earth.

The galactic slam occurred at a harmless asteroid 9.6 million kilometers away, with the spacecraft named Dart plowing into the space rock at 22,500 kph. Scientists expected the impact to carve out a crater, hurl streams of rocks and dirt into space and, most importantly, alter the asteroid’s orbit.

“We have impact!” Mission Control’s Elena Adams announced, jumping up and down and thrusting her arms skyward.

Telescopes around the world and in space aimed at the same point in the sky to capture the spectacle. Though the impact was immediately obvious — Dart’s radio signal abruptly ceased — it will take days or even weeks to determine how much the asteroid’s path has changed.

The $325 million mission was the first attempt to shift the position of an asteroid or any other natural object in space.

“We’re embarking on a new era of humankind,” said NASA’s Lori Glaze, planetary science division director.

Earlier in the day, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson reminded people via Twitter that, “No, this is not a movie plot.” He added in a prerecorded video: “We’ve all seen it on movies like ‘Armageddon,’ but the real-life stakes are high.”

Monday’s target: a 160-meter asteroid named Dimorphos. It’s actually a moonlet of Didymos, Greek for twin, a fast-spinning asteroid five times bigger that flung off the material that formed the junior partner.

The pair have been orbiting the sun for eons without threatening Earth, making them ideal save-the-world test candidates.

Launched last November, the vending machine-size Dart — short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test — navigated to its target using new technology developed by Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, the spacecraft builder and mission manager.

Dart’s onboard camera, a key part of this smart navigation system, caught sight of Dimorphos barely an hour before impact.

“Woo-hoo!” exclaimed Adams, a mission systems engineer at Johns Hopkins. “We’re seeing Dimorphos, so wonderful, wonderful.”

With an image beaming back to Earth every second, Adams and other ground controllers in Laurel, Maryland, watched with growing excitement as Dimorphos loomed larger and larger in the field of view alongside its bigger companion. Within minutes, Dimorphos was alone in the pictures; it looked like a giant gray lemon with boulders and rubble on the surface. The last image froze on the screen as the radio transmission ended.

Flight controllers cheered, hugged one another and exchanged high fives.

A mini satellite followed a few minutes behind to take photos of the impact. The Italian Cubesat was released from Dart two weeks ago.

Scientists insisted Dart would not shatter Dimorphos. The spacecraft packed a scant 570 kilograms, compared with the asteroid’s 5 billion kilograms. But that should be plenty to shrink its 11-hour, 55-minute orbit around Didymos.

The impact should pare 10 minutes off that, but telescopes will need anywhere from a few days to nearly a month to verify the new orbit. The anticipated orbital shift of 1% might not sound like much, scientists noted. But they stressed that over years, it would amount to a significant change.

Planetary defense experts prefer nudging a threatening asteroid or comet out of the way, given enough lead time, rather than blowing it up and creating multiple pieces that could rain down on Earth. Multiple impactors might be needed for big space rocks or a combination of impactors and so-called gravity tractors, not-yet-invented devices that would use their own gravity to pull an asteroid into a safer orbit.

“The dinosaurs didn’t have a space program to help them know what was coming, but we do,” NASA’s senior climate adviser Katherine Calvin said, referring to the mass extinction 66 million years ago believed to have been caused by a major asteroid impact, volcanic eruptions or both.

The nonprofit B612 Foundation, dedicated to protecting Earth from asteroid strikes, has been pushing for impact tests like Dart since its founding by astronauts and physicists 20 years ago. Monday’s feat aside, the world must do a better job of identifying the countless space rocks lurking out there, warned the foundation’s executive director, Ed Lu, a former astronaut.

Significantly less than half of the estimated 25,000 near-Earth objects in the deadly 140-meter range have been discovered, according to NASA. And fewer than 1% of the millions of smaller asteroids, capable of widespread injuries, are known.

The Vera Rubin Observatory, nearing completion in Chile by the National Science Foundation and U.S. Energy Department, promises to revolutionize the field of asteroid discovery, Lu noted.

Finding and tracking asteroids, “That’s still the name of the game here. That’s the thing that has to happen in order to protect the Earth,” he said.
…

Ten months after launch, NASA’s asteroid-deflecting DART spacecraft neared a planned impact with its target on Monday in a test of the world’s first planetary defense system, designed to prevent a doomsday collision with Earth.

The cube-shaped “impactor” vehicle, roughly the size of a vending machine with two rectangular solar arrays, was on course to fly into the asteroid Dimorphos, about as large as a football stadium, and self-destruct around 7 p.m. EDT (2300 GMT) some 11 million kilometers from Earth.

The mission’s finale will test the ability of a spacecraft to alter an asteroid’s trajectory with sheer kinetic force, plowing into the object at high speed to nudge it astray just enough to keep our planet out of harm’s way.

It marks the world’s first attempt to change the motion of an asteroid, or any celestial body.

DART, launched by a SpaceX rocket in November 2021, has made most of its voyage under the guidance of NASA’s flight directors, with control to be handed over to an autonomous on-board navigation system in the final hours of the journey.

Monday evening’s planned impact is to be monitored in real time from the mission operations center at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland.

DART’s celestial target is an asteroid “moonlet” about 170 meters in diameter that orbits a parent asteroid five times larger called Didymos as part of a binary pair with the same name, the Greek word for twin.

Neither object presents any actual threat to Earth, and NASA scientists said their DART test cannot create a new existential hazard by mistake.

Dimorphos and Didymos are both tiny compared with the cataclysmic Chicxulub asteroid that struck Earth some 66 million years ago, wiping out about three-quarters of the world’s plant and animal species including the dinosaurs.

Smaller asteroids are far more common and pose a greater theoretical concern in the near term, making the Didymos pair suitable test subjects for their size, according to NASA scientists and planetary defense experts.

Also, their relative proximity to Earth and dual-asteroid configuration make them ideal for the first proof-of-concept mission of DART, short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test.

Robotic suicide mission

The mission represents a rare instance in which a NASA spacecraft must ultimately crash to succeed.

The plan is for DART to fly directly into Dimorphos at 24,000 kilometers per hour, bumping it hard enough to shift its orbital track closer to its larger companion asteroid.

Cameras on the impactor and on a briefcase-sized mini-spacecraft released from DART days in advance are designed to record the collision and send images back to Earth.

DART’s own camera is expected to return pictures at the rate of one image per second during its final approach, with those images streaming live on NASA TV starting an hour before impact, according to APL.

The DART team said it expects to shorten the orbital track of Dimorphos by 10 minutes but would consider at least 73 seconds a success, proving the exercise as a viable technique to deflect an asteroid on a collision course with Earth — if one were ever discovered. A small nudge to an asteroid millions of miles away could be sufficient to safely reroute it away from the planet.

The test’s outcome will not be known until a new round of ground-based telescope observations of the two asteroids in October. Earlier calculations of the starting location and orbital period of Dimorphos were confirmed during a six-day observation period in July.

DART is the latest of several NASA missions in recent years to explore and interact with asteroids, primordial rocky remnants from the solar system’s formation more than 4.5 billion years ago.

Last year, NASA launched a probe on a voyage to the Trojan asteroid clusters orbiting near Jupiter, while the grab-and-go spacecraft OSIRIS-REx is on its way back to Earth with a sample collected in October 2020 from the asteroid Bennu.

The Dimorphos moonlet is one of the smallest astronomical objects to receive a permanent name and is one of 27,500 known near-Earth asteroids of all sizes tracked by NASA. Although none are known to pose a foreseeable hazard to humankind, NASA estimates that many more asteroids remain undetected in the near-Earth vicinity.

NASA has put the entire cost of the DART project at $330 million, well below that of many of the space agency’s most ambitious science missions.
…

Uganda said on Sunday its Ebola caseload had jumped to 16 people while a further 18 people also likely had the disease, fueling fears of a spreading outbreak that involves a strain for which a vaccine has not yet been found.

In a tweet, the Ministry of Health also said the death toll of confirmed cases remained four while 17 others classified as probable cases had also died. The outbreak had also now spread to three districts, all in central Uganda.

The east African country last week announced the outbreak of Ebola, a hemorrhagic fever whose symptoms include intense body weakness, muscle pain, headache and sore throat, vomiting, diarrhea and rashes among others.

The current outbreak, attributed to the Ebola Sudan strain, appears to have started in a small village in Mubende district around the beginning of September, authorities have said.

The first casualty was a 24-year old man who died earlier this week.

The World Health Organization says the Ebola Sudan strain is less transmissible and has shown a lower fatality rate in previous outbreaks than Ebola Zaire, a strain that killed nearly 2,300 people in the 2018-2020 epidemic in neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo.
…

In the first-of-its kind, save-the-world experiment, NASA is about to clobber a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles away.

A spacecraft named Dart will zero in on the asteroid Monday, intent on slamming it head-on at 14,000 mph (22,500 kph). The impact should be just enough to nudge the asteroid into a slightly tighter orbit around its companion space rock — demonstrating that if a killer asteroid ever heads our way, we’d stand a fighting chance of diverting it.

“This is stuff of science-fiction books and really corny episodes of “StarTrek” from when I was a kid, and now it’s real,” NASA program scientist Tom Statler said Thursday.

Cameras and telescopes will watch the crash, but it will take days or even weeks to find out if it actually changed the orbit.

The $325 million planetary defense test began with Dart’s launch last fall.

Asteroid target

The asteroid with the bull’s-eye on it is Dimorphos, about 7 million miles (9.6 million kilometers) from Earth. It is actually the puny sidekick of a 2,500-foot (780-meter) asteroid named Didymos, Greek for twin. Discovered in 1996, Didymos is spinning so fast that scientists believe it flung off material that eventually formed a moonlet. Dimorphos — roughly 525 feet (160 meters) across — orbits its parent body at a distance of less than a mile (1.2 kilometers).

“This really is about asteroid deflection, not disruption,” said Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist and mission team leader at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory, which is managing the effort. “This isn’t going to blow up the asteroid. It isn’t going to put it into lots of pieces.” Rather, the impact will dig out a crater tens of yards (meters) in size and hurl some 2 million pounds (1 million kilograms) of rocks and dirt into space.

NASA insists there’s a zero chance either asteroid will threaten Earth — now or in the future. That’s why the pair was picked.

Dart, the impactor

The Johns Hopkins lab took a minimalist approach in developing Dart — short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test — given that it’s essentially a battering ram and faces sure destruction. It has a single instrument: a camera used for navigating, targeting and chronicling the final action. Believed to be essentially a rubble pile, Dimorphos will emerge as a point of light an hour before impact, looming larger and larger in the camera images beamed back to Earth. Managers are confident Dart won’t smash into the larger Didymos by mistake. The spacecraft’s navigation is designed to distinguish between the two asteroids and, in the final 50 minutes, target the smaller one.

The size of a small vending machine at 1,260 pounds (570 kilograms), the spacecraft will slam into roughly 11 billion pounds (5 billion kilograms) of asteroid. “Sometimes we describe it as running a golf cart into a Great Pyramid,” said Chabot.

Unless Dart misses — NASA puts the odds of that happening at less than 10% — it will be the end of the road for Dart. If it goes screaming past both space rocks, it will encounter them again in a couple years for Take 2.

Saving earth

Little Dimorphos completes a lap around big Didymos every 11 hours and 55 minutes. The impact by Dart should shave about 10 minutes off that. Although the strike itself should be immediately apparent, it could take a few weeks or more to verify the moonlet’s tweaked orbit. Cameras on Dart and a mini tagalong satellite will capture the collision up close. Telescopes on all seven continents, along with the Hubble and Webb space telescopes and NASA’s asteroid-hunting Lucy spacecraft, may see a bright flash as Dart smacks Dimorphos and sends streams of rock and dirt cascading into space. The observatories will track the pair of asteroids as they circle the sun, to see if Dart altered Dimorphos’ orbit. In 2024, a European spacecraft named Hera will retrace Dart’s journey to measure the impact results.

Although the intended nudge should change the moonlet’s position only slightly, that will add up to a major shift over time, according to Chabot. “So if you were going to do this for planetary defense, you would do it five, 10, 15, 20 years in advance in order for this technique to work,” she said. Even if Dart misses, the experiment still will provide valuable insight, said NASA program executive Andrea Riley. “This is why we test. We want to do it now rather than when there’s an actual need,” she said.

Asteroid missions galore

Planet Earth is on an asteroid-chasing roll. NASA has close to a pound (450 grams) of rubble collected from asteroid Bennu headed to Earth. The stash should arrive next September. Japan was the first to retrieve asteroid samples, accomplishing the feat twice. China hopes to follow suit with a mission launching in 2025. NASA’s Lucy spacecraft, meanwhile, is headed to asteroids near Jupiter, after launching last year. Another spacecraft, Near-Earth Asteroid Scout, is loaded into NASA’s new moon rocket awaiting liftoff; it will use a solar sail to fly past a space rock that’s less than 60 feet (18 meters) next year. In the next few years, NASA also plans to launch a census-taking telescope to identify hard-to-find asteroids that could pose risks. One asteroid mission is grounded while an independent review board weighs its future. NASA’s Psyche spacecraft should have launched this year to a metal-rich asteroid between Mars and Jupiter, but the team couldn’t test the flight software in time.

Hollywood’s take

Hollywood has churned out dozens of killer-space-rock movies over the decades, including 1998′s “Armageddon” which brought Bruce Willis to Cape Canaveral for filming, and last year’s “Don’t Look Up” with Leonardo DiCaprio leading an all-star cast. NASA’s planetary defense officer, Lindley Johnson, figures he’s seen them all since 1979′s “Meteor,” his personal favorite “since Sean Connery played me.” While some of the sci-fi films are more accurate than others, he noted, entertainment always wins out. The good news is that the coast seems clear for the next century, with no known threats. Otherwise, “it would be like the movies, right?” said NASA’s science mission chief Thomas Zurbuchen. What’s worrisome, though, are the unknown threats. Fewer than half of the 460-foot (140-meter) objects have been confirmed, with millions of smaller but still-dangerous objects zooming around. “These threats are real, and what makes this time special, is we can do something about it,” Zurbuchen said. Not by blowing up an asteroid as Willis’ character did — that would be a last, last-minute resort — or by begging government leaders to take action as DiCaprio’s character did in vain. If time allows, the best tactic could be to nudge the menacing asteroid out of our way, like Dart.
…

NASA has called off the scheduled Tuesday launch of its historic uncrewed mission to the moon due to a tropical storm that is forecast to strengthen as it approaches Florida.

After two previously canceled launch attempts, NASA is weighing returning the Artemis 1 mission rocket to its assembly site under the threat of extreme weather.

“NASA is forgoing a launch opportunity… and preparing for rollback (from the launchpad), while continuing to watch the weather forecast associated with Tropical Storm Ian,” it said Saturday.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) said Ian is due to “rapidly intensify” over the weekend as it moves toward Florida, home to the Kennedy Space Center, from which the rocket is set to launch.

Currently south of Jamaica, the storm is expected to approach Florida’s west coast “at or near major hurricane strength” early next week, threatening storm surge, flooding and hurricane-force winds across much of the state, the NHC said.

On the launchpad, the giant orange and white Space Launch System (SLS) rocket can withstand wind gusts of up to 137 kilometers (85 miles) per hour. But if it has to be sheltered, the current launch window, which runs until October 4, will be missed.

A decision on whether to roll back the rocket to the Vehicle Assembly Building is due to be taken by the Artemis 1 team Sunday, “to allow for additional data gathering and analysis,” with the operation, if necessary, starting late Sunday or Monday morning, NASA said.

Jim Free, associate administrator for the agency’s exploration systems development directorate, said on Twitter that a “step-wise approach” to the decision to roll back preserves “a launch opportunity if conditions improve,” indicating a launch date before October 5 was still on the table.

If not, the next launch window will run from October 17 to 31, with one possibility of takeoff per day, except from October 24-26 and 28.

The Artemis 1 space mission hopes to test the SLS as well as the unmanned Orion capsule that sits atop it, in preparation for future Moon-bound journeys with humans aboard.

Artemis is named after the twin sister of the Greek god Apollo, after whom the first moon missions were named.

Unlike the Apollo missions, which sent only white men to the moon between 1969 and 1972, Artemis missions will see the first person of color and the first woman step foot on the lunar surface.

A successful Artemis 1 mission would come as a huge relief to the U.S. space agency, after years of delays and cost overruns.  

But another setback would be a blow to NASA, after two previous launch attempts were scrapped when the rocket experienced technical glitches including a fuel leak.

The cost of the Artemis program is estimated to reach $93 billion by 2025, with its first four missions clocking in at a whopping $4.1 billion each, according to a government audit.
…

U.S. health officials say 4.4 million Americans have received the updated COVID-19 booster shot. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention posted the count Thursday as public health experts bemoaned President Joe Biden’s recent remark that “the pandemic is over.” 

The White House said more than 5 million people had received the new boosters by its own estimate, which accounts for reporting lags in states. 

Health experts said it was too early to predict whether demand would match up with the 171 million doses of the new boosters the U.S. ordered for the fall. 

“No one would go looking at our flu shot uptake at this point and be like, ‘Oh, what a disaster,’ ” said Dr. David Dowdy, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “If we start to see a large uptick in cases, I think we’re going to see a lot of people getting the [new COVID] vaccine.” 

A temporary shortage of Moderna vaccine caused some pharmacies to cancel appointments while encouraging people to reschedule for a Pfizer vaccine. The issue was expected to resolve as government regulators wrapped up an inspection and cleared batches of vaccine doses for distribution. 

“I do expect this to pick up in the weeks ahead,” said White House COVID-19 coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha. “We’ve been thinking and talking about this as an annual vaccine like the flu vaccine. Flu vaccine season picks up in late September and early October. We’re just getting our education campaign going. So, we expect to see, despite the fact that this was a strong start, we actually expect this to ramp up stronger.” 

Some Americans who plan to get the shot, designed to target the most common omicron strains, said they were waiting because they either had COVID-19 recently or another booster. They are following public health advice to wait several months to get the full benefit of their existing virus-fighting antibodies. 

Others are scheduling shots closer to holiday gatherings and winter months when respiratory viruses spread more easily. 

Retired hospital chaplain Jeanie Murphy, 69, of Shawnee, Kansas, plans to get the new booster in a couple of weeks after she has some minor knee surgery. Interest is high among her neighbors, she said. 

“There’s quite a bit of discussion happening among people who are ready to make appointments,” Murphy said. “I found that encouraging.”

Steady state 

Biden later acknowledged criticism of his remark about the pandemic being over and clarified the pandemic is “not where it was.” The initial comment didn’t bother Murphy. She believes the disease has entered a steady state when “we’ll get COVID shots in the fall the same as we do flu shots.” 

Experts hope she’s right but are waiting to see what levels of infection winter brings. The summer ebb in case numbers, hospitalizations and deaths may be followed by another surge, Dowdy said. 

Some Americans who got the new shots said they were excited about the idea of targeting the vaccine to the variants circulating now. 

“Give me all the science you can,” said Jeff Westling, 30, an attorney in Washington, who got the new booster and a flu shot Tuesday, one in each arm. He participates in the combat sport jujitsu, so he wants to protect himself from infections that may come with close contact.  

Meanwhile, Biden’s pronouncement in a 60 Minutes interview broadcast Sunday echoed through social media. 

By Wednesday on Facebook, when a Kansas health department posted where residents could find the new booster shots, the first commenter remarked: “But Biden says the pandemic is over.” 

The president’s statement, despite his attempts to clarify it, adds to public confusion, said Josh Michaud, associate director of global health policy with the Kaiser Family Foundation in Washington. 

“People aren’t sure when is the right time to get boosted. ‘Am I eligible?’ People are often confused about what the right choice is for them, even where to search for that information,” Michaud said. 

“Any time you have mixed messages, it’s detrimental to the public health effort,” Michaud said. “Having the mixed messages from the president’s remarks makes that job that much harder.” 

University of South Florida epidemiologist Jason Salemi said he’s worried the president’s pronouncement has taken on a life of its own and may stall prevention efforts. 

“That soundbite is there for a while now, and it’s going to spread like wildfire. And it’s going to give the impression that ‘Oh, there’s nothing more we need to do,’ ” Salemi said. 

“If we’re happy with 400 or 500 people dying every single day from COVID, there’s a problem with that,” Salemi said. “We can absolutely do better because most of those deaths, if not all of them, are absolutely preventable with the tools that we have.”
…

Sprawling coastal cities in South and Southeast Asia are sinking faster than elsewhere in the world, leaving tens of millions of people more vulnerable to rising sea levels, a new study says. 

Rapid urbanization has seen these cities draw heavily on groundwater to service their burgeoning populations, according to research by Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University, published in the journal Nature Sustainability last week.  

“This puts cities experiencing rapid local land subsidence at greater risk of coastal hazards than already present due to climate-driven sea-level rise,” the study says. 

Vietnam’s most populous urban center and main business hub, Ho Chi Minh City, was sinking an average of 16.2 millimeters (0.6 inches) annually, topping the study’s survey of satellite data from 48 large coastal cities around the world. 

The southern Bangladeshi port of Chittagong was second on the list, with the western Indian city Ahmedabad, Indonesian capital Jakarta and Myanmar’s commercial hub Yangon also sinking more than 20 millimeters in peak years.  

“Many of these fast-subsiding coastal cities are rapidly expanding megacities, where … high demands for groundwater extraction and loading from densely constructed building structures, contribute to local land subsidence,” the study says. 

Sinking cities are not of themselves a result of climate change, but researchers said their work would give a better insight into how the phenomenon would “compound the effects of climate-driven mean sea-level rise.” 

More than 1 billion people will live in coastal cities at risk of rising sea levels by 2050, according to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  

The IPCC says that global sea levels could rise by up to 60 centimeters (24 inches) by the end of the century, even if greenhouse gas emissions are sharply reduced. 

 
…

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Thursday that Japan will abolish a series of COVID-19 border restrictions in hopes of reviving its tourism industry.

As of Oct. 11, Japan will allow individual visitors to enter the country, reinstate visa waivers and end the cap on daily arrivals. Kishida announced the long-awaited policy shift at a news conference in New York.

The changes come as Japan records the highest 28-day average of cases in the world, 3,052,150, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center.

Japan began allowing tourists on guided tours to enter the country in June, and tourists on nonguided tours who had booked through a registered travel agency could enter as of early September.

Japan also removed mandatory pre-arrival PCR tests for fully vaccinated travelers in September but kept the 50,000 cap on daily arrivals.

The new guidelines will open doors to an unlimited number of tourists as long as they have been vaccinated three times or submit a negative COVID-19 test ahead of their trip, Kyodo News reported.

The prime minister’s action to stimulate the Japanese economy comes after the yen declined to its lowest levels against the dollar in almost a quarter of a century.

“The currency has depreciated nearly 20% this year, sinking to 24-year lows,” Reuters reported.

In an additional attempt to stimulate the economy through tourism, the Japanese government is also implementing a nationwide travel discount program, providing incentives for foreigners to choose Japan over other tourist destinations.

Some information in this report came from Reuters.
…

NASA tries to save the world. Plus, the agency inches closer to its next moon mission, and geopolitical rivals unite in space. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
…

A new study released this week “conservatively” estimates there are 20 quadrillion ants on the planet Earth—or about 2.5 million ants for every person.

The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Hong Kong and Germany’s University of Wuerzburg, who noted ants are some of the most successful and dominant forms of life on earth but found most estimates of their numbers to be lacking, and, essentially, educated guesses.

In the study, published this week in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they explain they compiled data on both ground and tree-dwelling ants from 489 studies, spanning “all continents, major biomes, and habitats” to arrive at what they call a “conservative” estimate of 20 quadrillion ants, representing a biomass of 12 megatons.

The researchers say this is more than the combined biomass of wild birds and mammals and is equivalent to 20% of human biomass.

In a release from the University of Hong Kong, the researchers explain that having an accurate count of the world’s ants and an understanding of their abundance patterns may help preserve ecosystems and species around the world

The study also found ants are unevenly distributed over the global land surface. As a general pattern, ants are more common in tropical regions, but their numbers vary from place to place depending on the ecosystem.

University of Hong Kong School of Biological Sciences researcher Sabine Nooten, a co-lead author on the study, said the ants perform “ecological services” such as decomposition of organic material and pest control in whichever habitat they live.

The senior author of the study, University of Hong Kong researcher Benoit Guenard, said the ant count reflects the scarcity of data on so much of the natural world. He urged governments and societies to be more proactive in getting citizens involved in helping to fill those knowledge gaps.

Some information for this report came from Reuters.
…

Malawi has become the first country in southern Africa to eliminate trachoma, the leading infectious cause of blindness, the World Health Organization announced.

It is the fourth country in Africa to stamp out the bacterial infection, after Ghana, Gambia and Togo. The WHO said in a statement that Malawi has been known to be endemic for trachoma since the 1980s. 

The disease received due attention in 2008 following a survey conducted in support of the WHO and Sightsavers, a nongovernmental organization. 

The findings spurred the country to step up efforts against trachoma by establishing a national taskforce which implemented the WHO-recommended strategy known as SAFE to control the spread of the disease. The SAFE strategy comprises provision of surgery, antibiotics to clear the infection, facial cleanliness and environmental improvement through access to water and sanitation. 

Bright Chiwaula, country director for Sightsavers in Malawi, said besides the SAFE strategy, the achievement is also a result of several elements, including training of surgeons and the promotion of good hygiene education. 

“Another element is where we assured that we had a monitoring mechanism in place that was effective and efficient, making sure that we were able to track what was happening in the country as regards trachoma elimination,” Chiwaula said.  

Trachoma is one of a number of neglected tropical diseases, or NTDs, and is endemic in nearly half the countries in Africa.   

In a statement Wednesday, Malawi President Lazarus Chakwera paid special tribute to community health workers, many of them women, whom he said played an instrumental role in freeing millions of citizens from the misery caused by these diseases. 

Chakwera said he hopes such an achievement would be replicated in the fight against other NTDs like scabies, schistosomiasis and river blindness. 

Caroline Harper, CEO of Sightsavers, told VOA Thursday that her organization is working towards that. 

“The great news is that Malawi is very close to eliminating river blindness,” she said. “Sightsavers in Malawi are helping the ministry to do that. We are actually working in 30 countries on NTDs across the whole of Africa.” 

Harper said Sightsavers made a commitment at a global summit in Rwanda in June to invest at least $20 million in the fight against neglected tropical diseases, but added the organization is hoping to raise far more than that in the future.  

 
…

Uganda has confirmed seven cases of Ebola including that of a 24-year-old man who died earlier this week, and an additional seven deaths are being investigated as suspected Ebola cases, a health ministry official said on Thursday.

The man who died had developed a high fever, diarrhea and abdominal pains, and was vomiting blood. After initially being treated for malaria, he was diagnosed as having contracted the Sudan strain of the Ebola virus.

“As of today, we have seven confirmed cases, of whom we have one confirmed death,” Dr Kyobe Henry Bbosa, Ebola Incident Commander at the Ugandan Ministry of Health, told a briefing.

“But also we have seven probable cases that died before the confirmation of the outbreak.”

Uganda last reported an outbreak of Ebola Sudan strain in 2012.

In 2019, the country experienced an outbreak of Ebola Zaire. The virus was imported from neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo which was battling a large epidemic in its north-eastern region. 

In August, a new case of Ebola virus was confirmed in the city of Beni in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. An Ebola vaccination campaign was launched last month in the Congolese city of Beni last month.
…

Displaced by some of the worst flooding in years, hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis now face the threat of disease. Infections are on the rise due to unsanitary conditions, and health facilities damaged by historic rains are struggling to cope. VOA’s Sarah Zaman has more.
…

Commenters in China’s tightly controlled online communities are raising an angry howl at what they see as the latest outrage stemming from President Xi Jinping’s draconian zero-COVID policy.

After at least 27 people died when a bus in southwest China’s Guizhou Province crashed while transporting them to a coronavirus quarantine facility, online comments revealed the magnitude of frustration of ordinary citizens enduring a policy that forces them into lengthy lockdowns and daily testing in the effort to contain COVID.

“27 people, who did not die in the coronavirus, but died in the bus accident [on the way to] quarantine? Even if they are positive, the death rate of the virus is extremely low, who made such a tragedy?”
“No ordinary people are against epidemic prevention. What the ordinary people oppose is ... harassment of people.”
“So many people concentrated in a bus transport for quarantine. If there was a positive case, how likely would all the people in the bus get infected? I don't understand the current policy. ​”
“We are all on the bus leading to death."

Censors quickly scrubbed the comments saved by FreeWeibo, a website that tracks comments blocked on China’s Twitter-like platform, Weibo.

According to Lin Gang, Guiyang’s deputy mayor, the bus was carrying 47 people who were under “medical observation” from Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou Province, to a remote county, Libo, when it overturned on a highway around 170 kilometers from its destination about 2:40 a.m. Sunday.

In addition to the deaths, 20 people were taken to the hospital. As of Wednesday, there was no word on their condition.

It remains unclear why people were being bused to quarantine centers in the middle of night, which violates China’s prohibition on the operation of long-distance commercial buses between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m.  The cause of the crash remains under investigation.

Although the city of Guiyang and Guizhou province have experienced a recent increase in COVID cases, Guiyang officials announced Sept. 16 that the city would achieve “societal zero-COVID” by Sept. 19, according to a report by Caixin, a Chinese business news outlet.

On Sept. 17, Guizhou authorities said on their official WeChat account that they were sending people who had tested positive elsewhere for quarantine because of limited resources in Guiyang, according to the official news site China Daily. At the time, 7,396 people had been transferred from the city, and 2,900 people were scheduled for transfer.

After the bus crash on Sept. 18, one of the passengers said officials identified all residents of her building for quarantine even though there were no reported cases, reported Caixin.

Unverified photos of the bus began circulating on Chinese social media showing the driver wearing a full hazmat suit with only his eyes uncovered. The photos generated a new round of anger and criticism of the zero-COVID policy.

“When will it stop?” was a slogan repeated on Weibo.

Trending topic

China continues to assume some of the strictest COVID-19 measures in the world, attempting to record zero cases by isolating those with confirmed infections and quarantining anyone who may have been exposed. China says the policy is necessary to keep its health system from being overwhelmed.

However, restrictions across the country have weighed heavily on the country’s economy and even led to food and medical shortages in Shanghai and other areas.

Response to the bus crash soared to be Weibo’s top trending topic  Sunday afternoon, until it disappeared from the top 50 slots. Elsewhere online, authorities removed widely shared angry blog posts on the crash.

Municipal instructions on how to ride a bus safely, posted to Weibo by Guizhou police and fire departments, only drew more sharp criticism.

“[This is a] classic blurring of focus and shifting of responsibility,” said one comment retrieved from FreeWeibo by VOA Mandarin.

“Just don’t drive me around for quarantine,” said another.

A day after the crash, Guizhou Province officials announced on WeChat that an investigation is ongoing and three local officials had been suspended.

Guizhou recorded 188 new confirmed cases  Tuesday, accounting for about 25% of all new cases in China, according to the National Health Commission of the People’s Republic of China. The province has been on high alert since the end of August when one new case was reported.

But since the beginning of the pandemic, official data show only two people have died of COVID in Guizhou, a province of 38 million people.

Worldwide, as of Sept. 21, there have been more than 6.5 million deaths attributed to COVID-19, with 15,149 of them in China and just over 1 million in the U.S., according to the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 tracker.

Across China, local officials are under intense pressure to contain any outbreaks ahead of the Communist Party’s congress next month, when President Xi is poised to secure his third term as China’s top leader.

Nine local officials in Guiyang were suspended earlier this month for failing to implement COVID policies properly.

“At this time, to strengthen the lockdown with the zero-COVID policy is to ensure stability and to ensure that there is no social unrest,” Kuan-Ting Chen, chief executive officer of Taiwan Nextgen Foundation, told VOA Mandarin. “So, in the future, at least until Party Congress begins, I think it will become more and more strict.”

Some information in this report came from Reuters. 
…

Turkey’s plastic recycling industry is strongly criticized in a Human Rights Watch report released Wednesday. The report highlights health problems for workers and residents and criticizes the European Union, for which Turkey is the main plastics recycler. Dorian Jones reports from Istanbul.
…

The World Health Organization warns noncommunicable diseases kill 41 million people each year, equivalent to 74 percent of all deaths globally.

A new global report by the World Health Organization finds noncommunicable diseases now outnumber infectious diseases as the top killers globally. Each year, it says 17 million people under age 70 die prematurely from noncommunicable diseases or NCD. The biggest killers are cardiovascular diseases, followed by cancers, chronic respiratory diseases, and diabetes.

WHO director of noncommunicable diseases, Bente Mikkelsen, says most of these deaths are preventable.

“Every two seconds, someone under the age of 70 is dying from an NCD,” said Mikkelsen. “And many people do not still realize that 86 percent of these premature deaths, namely dying too young are taking place in low-and-middle-income countries, making NCD an issue of equity and sustainable development as well as health.”

WHO blames most of these preventable deaths on four key risk factors. It cites high blood pressure as the biggest threat, noting 1.3 billion adults worldwide have this condition.

Mikkelsen says too many people are unaware they have this potentially deadly condition. Consequently, they are not getting the lifesaving treatment they need.

“If people had access to health services where they could get their blood pressure checked and get support to manage hypertension, nearly 10 million heart attacks and strokes could be averted by 2030,” said Mikkelsen. “Other major risk factors like unhealthy diet, tobacco use, and harmful use of alcohol are heavily influenced by industry, including the formulation, packaging design, marketing, and promotional product.”

WHO reports at least 39 million deaths could be averted by 2030 if every country were to adopt the interventions known to work.

The U.N. Health Agency urges people to embrace healthier lifestyles and modify risky behavior to reduce their chances of getting a deadly disease. It says those who stop smoking, exercise more, eat a healthier diet and drink only moderate amounts of alcohol will add years to their lives.
…

For the first time in India, a domestically-made vaccine that provides protection against cervical cancer—the second-most common type of cancer afflicting women in the country—will be accessible to the majority of the population, including the poorest, according to leading healthcare professionals.

The vaccine, Cervavac, is produced by The Serum Institute of India (SII), the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer. The vaccine shot is expected to launch by December this year, SII chief executive Adar Poonawalla said in a statement Tuesday.

“Cervavac will make India self-sufficient in controlling female mortality caused by cervical cancer. The government of India will induct it in the national [vaccination] program in a few months,” Poonawalla said.

The vaccine protects against the Human Papilloma Virus, the main cause of cervical cancer and a potential cause of other cancers. SSI says it will be accessible to both men and women at a price range of 200 to 400 rupees—about $2.50 to $5.

Dr. Smita Joshi, leader of the SII’s HPV vaccine study, said “The vaccine will be chiefly beneficial for girls aged 9 to 15 or women who are not yet sexually active.

“If we vaccinate adolescent girls now, its effect on reducing the cancer burden in the country will be seen within three to four decades,” she said.

According to Joshi, the effectiveness of the vaccine is lower among adult women, who will require cervical cancer screenings—preferably with an HPV test—followed by appropriate management for those who test positive for sexually transmitted HPV.

Dr. Mayoukh Kumar Chakraborty, assistant professor of gynecology and obstetrics at Kolkata’s KPC Medical College & Hospital, said even though three highly effective foreign-manufactured HPV vaccines are already available in India, the cheapest of them is priced around $35 per dose.

“So, HPV vaccination was not included in the national immunization program following its introduction in 2008,” he said.

In a statement, SII said it is offering Cervavac at a lower price because of the company’s “philanthropic philosophy” and to protect under-privileged children all over the world.

According to India’s Science and Technology Ministry, cervical cancer kills about 75,000 Indian women per year.

Science and Technology Minister Dr. Jitendra Singh said that the COVID-19 pandemic has sparked awareness regarding preventative healthcare and India can now afford to start developing its own vaccines.

“Therefore, vaccination against HPV is the most promising initiative in the quest to prevent cervical cancer,” he said.

Joshi, who also leads the World Health Organization’s HPV vaccine study at Jehangir Clinical Development Center in the city of Pune, said: “The awareness about cervical cancer prevention in India, which includes vaccination and cervical cancer screening, is dismally low.”

There are many misconceptions regarding the disease, even among the educated population and healthcare providers, she said.

“It is advised that adolescent girls get HPV vaccinations, and that women between the ages of 30 to 49 get cervical cancer screenings, even if they have no symptoms,” she added.

Chakraborty, the gynecologist, said the upcoming Indian vaccine is expected to be effective.

“The country’s drug regulatory authority examined the data of Cervavac’s immunogenicity trials conducted at 13 centers across India and approved the vaccine in July. It is expected to generate a robust response in 100% of the vaccine recipients, according to the third phase of the trials,” he said.

Joshi added: “Through this initiative, the goal of eliminating cervical cancer from the country may be attainable.”

Bollywood actor Manisha Koirala, who has been an ovarian cancer survivor for ten years, thanked the Ministry of Science and Technology at the event announcing the impending launch of Cervavac.

“It is a great day for women in India and the world over, as there is life beyond cancer,” she said.
…