As China’s ruling Communist Party holds a congress this week, many Beijing residents are focused on an issue not on the formal agenda: Will the end of the meeting bring an easing of the at times draconian “zero-COVID” policies that are disrupting lives and the economy?

It appears to be wishful thinking. As the world moves to a post-pandemic lifestyle, many across China have resigned themselves to lining up several times a week for COVID-19 tests, restrictions on their travels to other regions, and the ever-present possibility of a community lockdown.

“There is nothing we can do,” Zhang Yiming, 51, said this week at a park in Beijing. “If we look at the situation abroad, like the United States where over 1 million people have died, right? In China, although it is true that some aspects of our life are not convenient, such as travel and economy, it seems that there is no good solution.”

People are looking to the party congress, which ends Saturday, for two reasons. The meeting, which is held every five years and sets the national agenda for the next five, can send signals of possible changes in policy direction.

Secondly, authorities always tighten controls — COVID-19 and otherwise — before and during a major event to try to eliminate disruptions or distractions, so they could relax controls when the event ends.

Any hopes for an easing, though, appear to have been dashed before the congress. The Communist Party’s newspaper, the People’s Daily, published a series of opinion pieces on the effectiveness of China’s “zero-COVID” approach, and health officials said last week China must stick with it.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, praised the policy at the opening ceremony of the congress. He said it had prioritized and protected people’s health and safety and made a “tremendous achievement in striking the balance between epidemic response and economic and social development.”

After an initial outbreak in early 2020 that killed more than 4,000 people and overflowed hospitals and morgues, China was largely successful in taming the virus while other countries were overwhelmed with it — a contrast trumpeted in Communist Party propaganda.

Then came omicron in late 2021. China had to employ ever more widespread restrictions to control the faster-spreading variant, locking down entire cites and starting regular testing of practically the entire population of 1.4 billion people.

The measures have bred simmering discontent, fed by instances of harsh enforcement that in some cases had tragic consequences.

During a two-month lockdown of Shanghai last spring, videos widely shared on social media showed officials breaking down apartment doors to drag unwilling residents to quarantine facilities. Children were also separated from their parents, because one or the other was infected.

Instances of hospitals denying treatment because of pandemic rules sparked outrage, including a woman in labor who lost her baby after she wasn’t allowed into a hospital during a lockdown of the city of Xi’an because she couldn’t show a negative COVID-19 test result.

While public protests are relatively rare in China, some people took to the streets in Shanghai and Dandong to protest harsh and prolonged lockdowns.

Last week, three days before the congress opened, banners were flung over an elevated roadway calling for Xi’s overthrow and an end to the “zero-COVID” policy. The incident spilled over into at least one other city, where photos shared on Twitter showed similar statements posted on a bus stop in the city of Xi’an.

Andy Chen, senior analyst at Trivium China, a Beijing-headquartered policy consultancy, said restrictions beyond the party congress should come as no surprise.

“All the conditions that have forced the government to put zero-COVID in place haven’t really changed,” he said, singling out the lack of an effective vaccine and the absence of sound home quarantine rules.

Even though vaccines are widely available, China’s homegrown versions don’t work as well as the Pfizer, Moderna and other shots developed elsewhere. China also has resisted vaccine mandates, keeping down vaccination rates. As of mid-October, 90% had received two shots, but only 57% had a booster shot.

Beijing authorities have doubled down on the hardline coronavirus policies during the congress.

Highway checkpoints into the city are heavily policed, with all entrants required to show a “green” code on a mobile phone app to prove they haven’t traveled to medium or high-risk areas.

Some express commuter bus lines between Beijing and neighboring Tianjin city and Hebei province have been suspended since Oct. 12.

Anyone who has been in a city, district, or neighborhood where even one case of coronavirus has been found within seven days is banned from entering the Chinese capital.

Within the city, the daily lives of residents are dictated by their health codes. They must use an app to scan the QR code of any facility they enter to show their status and log their whereabouts.

Without a green code and a negative coronavirus test result within 72 hours, people are not allowed into office buildings, shopping malls, restaurants and other public places. The policy means most of Beijing’s 21 million-plus residents take a coronavirus test at least two to three times a week.

And there is always the risk of a sudden lockdown. Officials in hazmat suits guarded entries to gated communities this week in Fengtai district, where five neighborhoods have been categorized as high-risk. Residents were not allowed to leave their compounds, and some shops were forced to close.

While the party congress has not provided the watershed moment that some have been hoping for, it may turn out to be the point at which the government begins to lay the groundwork for a long process of loosening restrictions, said Dr. Yanzhong Huang, director of the Center for Global Health Studies at Seton Hall University and an expert on public health in China.

Some factors suggest the government will be in no rush to open up, including a broad acceptance of the policy among those who are inconvenienced but have not experienced prolonged or repeated lockdowns.

“The vast, vast majority of the population goes on with their lives, unaffected, and that’s a much better policy from the government perspective to implement than, for example, forcing a vaccine mandate through the population,” Chen said.

But Huang noted signs of social instability, especially among the middle class and urban residents.

“I think the question is whether it has reached a tipping point that people really find this is not acceptable anymore,” he said. “We cannot tolerate that anymore. It remains to be seen even in the large cities, you know, how people are willing to tolerate draconian measures.”
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 A decade-old publicity stunt continues shaping modern life. Plus, satellite TV gets a serious upgrade, and the Webb telescope gives us another stunning image. VOA’s Arash Arabasadi brings us The Week in Space.
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The World Health Organization warns physical inactivity can lead to the development of debilitating noncommunicable diseases and millions of premature deaths.

Data from 194 countries show governments are not doing enough to encourage their populations to engage in physical activity, including creating the opportunities for people to be more active and move around freely.

For example, the World Health Organization reports too few countries encourage active and sustainable transport. It notes just over 40% of countries have road design standards that make walking and cycling safer.

Fiona Bull, head of WHO’s physical activity unit within the Department of Health Promotion, said this neglect results in staggering economic, physical, and mental costs.

“Our estimates indicate that $27 billion a year or up to 2030, $300 billion dollars (in costs) could be averted if we increased physical activity,” she said. “It estimated that 500 million new cases of key important NCDs (noncommunicable diseases) and mental health conditions could be prevented by increasing physical activity.”

The report says nearly 500 million people will develop heart disease, obesity, diabetes or other noncommunicable diseases by 2030 due to inactivity.

Latest global estimates show 1.4 billion adults do not do enough physical activity to improve and protect their health. In 2016, it said, levels of inactivity among adults in high-income countries were double those in low-income countries.

The report finds women in most countries are less active than men, particularly in the eastern Mediterranean region and in the Americas. Juana Willumsen, technical officer in WHO’s physical activity unit, attributed this difference to lack of opportunities for women to engage in physical activity.

“Often women are finding it harder to access opportunities, finding it harder to find time to be physically active and to incorporate that within their day,” she said. “As well as many cultural barriers to physical activity. There are some cultures in which it is not currently seen as acceptable or appropriate for women to be active.”

The World Health Organization recommends adults engage in at least 150 minutes a week of moderate physical activity. For children, it recommends 60 minutes of physical activity every day.

The good news is people do not have to run a marathon or participate in the Tour de France to stay healthy. WHO officials said all sorts of physical activity such as climbing stairs, walking, playing with the children, and doing household chores, are beneficial for health.

What is important, they said, is to keep moving.
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Canberra scientists are researching a mysterious new recreational drug not seen before in Australia. The Australian National University says the substance is a “close cousin” of ketamine, a controlled anesthetic used by doctors and veterinarians.

The new substance is known as “CanKet” — a Canberra ketamine. It was discovered at Australia’s first government-supported pill-testing center that started as a trial in the national capital earlier this year.

The research team says the new drug was handed in at Australia’s first pill-checking center in Canberra. The user thought it was ketamine but said its effects were unusual and wanted it checked by experts at the pill-monitoring service. The drug was presented in a “small plastic bag of crystals and powder.”

Australian National University scientists believe the new drug was probably imported from overseas. It is not known whether CanKet has side effects. It is chemically similar to ketamine but has characteristics that have not been seen previously.

Associate professor Malcolm McLeod of the Australian National University Research School of Chemistry told VOA that ketamine and its derivatives are becoming increasingly popular illicit drugs.

Ketamine is used in medicine and as a horse tranquilizer. It is also a popular recreational drug linked to a phenomenon known as the “k-hole” — a type of out-of-body experience. Common side effects include nightmares, hallucinations, high blood pressure and confusion.

It is typically injected, snorted, or taken orally.

In 2019, an estimated 9 million Australians — or more than 40% of the population aged over 14 — had illicitly used a drug, according to the National Drug Strategy Household Survey. The survey is a government-funded project that has been collecting data about alcohol, tobacco and drug consumption in Australia every two to three years since 1985.

The most popular illicit drugs were cannabis and cocaine. The survey showed that ketamine use rose from 0.4% of respondents in 2016 to 0.9% in 2019.
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The first Native American woman in space said Wednesday she is overwhelmed by the beauty and delicacy of Mother Earth and is channeling “positive energy” as her five-month mission gets underway.

NASA astronaut Nicole Mann said from the International Space Station that she’s received lots of prayers and blessings from her family and tribal community. She is a member of the Wailacki of the Round Valley Indian Tribes in Northern California.

Mann showed off the dream catcher she took up with her, a childhood gift from her mother that she’s always held dear. The small traditional webbed hoop with feathers is used to offer protection, and she said it’s given her strength during challenging times. Years before joining NASA in 2013, she flew combat in Iraq for the Marines.

“It’s the strength to know that I have the support of my family and community back home and that when things are difficult or things are getting hard or I’m getting burned out or frustrated, that strength is something that I will draw on to continue toward a successful mission,” Mann told The Associated Press, which gathered questions from members and tribal news outlets across the country.

Mann said she’s always heeded her mother’s advice on the importance of positive energy, especially on launch day.

“It’s difficult for some people maybe to understand because it’s not really tangible,” she said. “But that positive energy is so important, and you can control that energy, and it helps to control your attitude.”

Mann, 45, a Marine colonel and test pilot who was born in Petaluma, California, said it’s important to recognize there are all types of people aboard the space station. It’s currently home to three Americans, three Russians and one Japanese astronaut.

“What that does is it just highlights our diversity and how incredible it is when we come together as a human species, the wonderful things that we can do and that we can accomplish,” she said.

While fascinated with stars and space as a child, Mann said she did not understand who became astronauts or even what they did.

“Unfortunately, in my mind at that time, it was not in the realm of possibilities,” she said.

Now, she’s taking in the sweeping vistas of Earth from 260 miles (420 kilometers) up and hoping to see the constellations as she encourages youngsters to follow their dreams.

As for describing Earth from space, “the emotions are absolutely overwhelming,” she said. “It is an incredible scene of color, of clouds and land, and it’s difficult not to stay in the cupola (lookout) all day and just see our planet Earth and how beautiful she is, and how delicate and fragile she is against the blackest of black that I’ve ever seen — space — in the background.”

Mann rocketed into orbit with SpaceX on October 5. She’ll be up there until March. She and her husband, a retired Navy fighter pilot, have a 10-year-old son back home in Houston.

The first Native American in space, in 2002, was now-retired astronaut John Herrington of the Chickasaw Nation.
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The World Health Organization said Wednesday it is too early to lift the highest-level alert for the COVID-19 crisis, with the pandemic remaining a global health emergency despite recent progress.

The WHO’s emergency committee on COVID-19 met last week and concluded that the pandemic still constitutes a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), a status it declared back in January 2020.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters Wednesday that he agreed with the committee’s advice.

“The committee emphasized the need to strengthen surveillance and expand access to tests, treatments and vaccines for those most at risk,” he said, speaking from the UN health agency’s headquarters in Geneva.

The WHO first declared the COVID-19 outbreak a PHEIC on January 30, 2020, when, outside of China, fewer than 100 cases and no deaths had been reported.

Although declaration of a PHEIC is the internationally agreed mechanism for triggering an international response to such outbreaks, it was only in March, when Tedros described the worsening situation as a pandemic, that many countries woke up to the danger.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 622 million confirmed COVID-19 cases have been reported to WHO and more than 6.5 million deaths, although those numbers are believed to be significant underestimates.

According to WHO’s global dashboard, 263,000 new cases were reported in the previous 24 hours, while 856 new COVID-19 deaths had been reported in the past week.

Tedros acknowledged Wednesday that “the global situation has obviously improved since the pandemic began,” but warned that “the virus continues to change and there remain many risks and uncertainties.”

“The pandemic has surprised us before and very well could again,” he warned.

‘Surveillance has declined’

Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead, agreed, warning that there were still “millions of cases being reported each week, but our surveillance has declined.”

That decline is making it difficult to get a full overview of the situation and especially of how the virus is mutating. Van Kerkhove stressed that “the more this virus circulates, the more opportunities it has to change.”

The omicron variant accounts for basically all virus samples that are sequenced, with more than 300 sublineages of that variant recorded.

“All of the subvariants of omicron are showing increased transmissibility and properties of immune escape,” Van Kerkove said, adding that one new combination of two different subvariants was showing “significant immune evasion.”

“This is a concern for us because we need to ensure that the vaccines that are in use worldwide remain effective at preventing severe disease and death,” she said.

In light of the broad spread of new omicron subvariants, Van Kerkhove stressed that “countries need to be in a position to conduct surveillance to deal with increases in cases and perhaps deal with increases in hospitalizations.”

“We have to remain vigilant.”
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The eight most recent Ebola cases reported during the outbreak in Uganda have no known links with current patients, the World Health Organization said Wednesday, raising concerns about the spread of the deadly disease.

In a briefing, WHO said initial investigations into the cases by Uganda’s Ministry of Health had found they were not contacts of people already known to have Ebola.

“We remain concerned that there may be more chains of transmission and more contacts than we know about in the affected communities,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters.

There have been 60 confirmed and 20 probable cases since the outbreak began last month, and 44 deaths, the WHO said.

The strain spreading in Uganda is the Sudan strain, and the existing vaccines and therapies do not work against it.

However, the Ugandan government is collaborating with WHO to set up a trial of two vaccines in the early stages of development that target the Sudan strain — one developed by Oxford University and the Serum Institute, and one made by the Sabin Institute in the United States, WHO confirmed.

The U.S. has also sent experimental therapies to help tackle the outbreak.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said on Saturday that the government was implementing some lockdown measures, including restricting movement and closing places of worship and entertainment, in Mubende and Kassanda districts in central Uganda, the epicenter of the epidemic.
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The World Health Organization said on Wednesday it will temporarily suspend the standard two-dose vaccination regimen for cholera, replacing it with a single dose due to vaccine shortages and rising outbreaks worldwide. 

The U.N. agency said “the exceptional decision reflects the grave state of the cholera vaccine stockpile” at a time when countries like Haiti, Syria and Malawi are fighting large outbreaks of the deadly disease, which spreads through contact with contaminated water and food. 

As of October 9, Haiti had confirmed 32 cases and 18 deaths from the disease, while many cases were still awaiting confirmation. 

“The pivot in strategy will allow for the doses to be used in more countries, at a time of unprecedented rise in cholera outbreaks worldwide,” WHO said in a statement on Wednesday. 

The WHO’s emergencies director Mike Ryan told reporters in a briefing that the change in strategy was a sign of the “scale of the crisis” caused by a lack of focus on safe sanitation and immunization for all at risk. 

“It’s a sad day for us to have to go backwards,” he said. 

The one-dose strategy had proved to be effective as a response to cholera outbreaks, the agency said, although the duration of protection is limited and appears to be much lower in children. 

The disease often causes no or mild symptoms, but serious cases cause acute diarrhea and can kill within hours if untreated. 

Cholera cases have surged this year, especially in places of poverty and conflict, with outbreaks reported in 29 countries and fatality rates rising sharply. The WHO also said that climate change means that cholera is a risk in an increasing number of countries, as the bacteria causing the illness multiplies faster in warmer waters. 

A cholera outbreak in Syria has already killed at least 33 people, posing a danger across the frontlines of the country’s 11-year war and stirring fears in crowded camps for the displaced. 

A cholera outbreak in a north Cameroon refugee camp has killed three people and infected at least 36, the UN refugee agency said on Wednesday. 

The first case was confirmed on Saturday in the Minawao refugee camp, which hosts around 75,000 people who fled Boko Haram insurgents in neighboring Nigeria. 

 
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Experts say record-breaking floods in Australia are allowing mosquitoes to thrive, increasing the risk of spreading diseases like Japanese Encephalitis.

Communities across three states have in recent days been hit by flooding, and more torrential rain is forecast this week. Parts of eastern Australia have been repeatedly flooded in the past two-years.

Mosquitoes need stagnant water. Immature insects emerge from eggs and develop underwater until they become pupae, and then adults. Females require blood before laying eggs and can inject saliva and virus into humans when they bite.

Mosquito-borne diseases are a perennial problem in Australia, where thousands of people are infected with the Ross River virus each year.

In 2021, Japanese Encephalitis gained a significant foothold in Australia for the first time.

More than 40 people were infected with the virus, and seven people died, according to government data.

The virus moves between mosquitos and water birds. Pigs, too, can also harbor the virus.

The illness it causes can be mild, but in some cases, patients can suffer seizures.

Experts have said that fewer than one percent of people infected will develop a severe brain condition — called encephalitis — which can be fatal.

Associate Professor Cameron Webb from the New South Wales Health Department told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. that recent flooding increases the risk of Japanese encephalitis infection.

“There [are] hundreds of different types of mosquitos in Australia, but there is one mosquito in particular that we are concerned about when it comes to Japanese encephalitis virus,” he said. “It is a mosquito that thrives in freshwater environments, the type of environments that have been created by excessive rainfall and flooding across much of the country.”

Two naturally occurring climatic phenomena — La Niña and the Indian Ocean Dipole — are fueling the flooding. Experts have said that their impact is being intensified by climate change.

Australian troops and residents have been racing to build a two kilometers long levee to stop floodwaters from inundating the town of Echuca, north of Melbourne. Parts of eastern Australia have had their worst flooding in decades.

With heavy rain in the forecast later this week, regions from Queensland to Tasmania in eastern Australia are once again on flood watch.
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Cameroon says a fresh wave of cholera outbreak provoked by ongoing floods in its northern border with Chad and Nigeria has killed at least 17 people and many more are feared dead in difficult-to-access villages within a week. An emergency meeting by government officials and relief agencies on Wednesday ordered the deployment of humanitarian workers to overcrowded hospitals, especially on the border with Nigeria. 

Cameroon’s Public Health Ministry officials say several hundred fresh cholera cases have been detected on the country’s northern border with Nigeria with at least 17 people dead and many other civilians in desperate conditions at hospitals.

The government of the central African state on Wednesday said the death toll and suspected infections may be higher as humanitarian workers are not able to travel to towns and villages that are difficult to access.

The government says insecurity from ongoing Boko Haram terrorist attacks prevents aid workers from providing assistance to suspected cholera patients in some localities on Cameroon’s northern border with Chad and Nigeria.

Midjiyawa Bakary, the governor of Cameroon’s Far North region on the border with Chad and Nigeria, says he presided at an emergency meeting ordered by Cameroon president Paul Biya on Wednesday.

Bakary says it was decided that all civilians on Cameroon’s northern border with Chad and Nigeria should immediately respect measures taken at the emergency meeting to reduce or stop the wave of cholera attacks. He says local councils must construct community toilets and latrines, civilians must use the toilets and people should stop drinking water from flooded streams that are likely contaminated. Bakary says Cameroon’s military will protect health workers dispatched to areas still suffering Boko Haram attacks.

Bakary said humanitarian workers in affected towns and villages are instructing civilians on consuming cooked food and boiling water to reduce cholera contamination and infections, especially among children.

Bakary called on civilians to stop the practice of defecating in streams, fields, forests, bushes, lakes and rivers and to wash their hands with soap and clean water regularly.

The government says Mayo-Sava, a department on Cameroon’s northern border with Nigeria, is hardest hit by the cholera outbreak.

Roger Saffo, the highest government official in Mayo-Sava, says international relief agencies are donating personal hygiene to children and medication for aid workers to take care of the needs of civilians in affected towns and villages.

“We have already received sanitary kits from the regional office of the World Health Organization based in Maroua and Doctors Without Borders which has permitted the medical personnel to take care of the suspected cases, disinfection of infected localities in collaboration with the community in Mayo-Sava division,” he said, speaking via the messaging app WhatsApp from Mora, the capital of Mayo-Sava.

The government says floods are triggering the spike in cholera cases.

Linda Esso, deputy director for the Fight against Epidemics and Pandemics at Cameroon’s Public Health Ministry, says Cameroonians should not think that the ongoing wave of infections originates in Nigeria, which reported a cholera outbreak after this month’s deadly floods on the border with Cameroon. She says there are possibilities that some civilians infected or affected by the outbreak are moving to access hospitals on both sides of the border to seek help.

The U.N. reports that up to this month, more than 1,000 cases of cholera were reported in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe — states in Nigeria that share a border with northern Cameroon and Chad.

Esso said the cholera outbreak is spreading rapidly in areas of the Lake Chad basin that are shared by Cameroon, Chad, Nigeria, Niger and the Central African Republic.

Cameroon government officials say they have engaged in discussions with Nigeria and Chad to jointly combat the outbreak along their borders.

Cholera is a bacterial infection that causes severe diarrhea and dehydration, usually spread over water. It can be fatal if not treated in hospitals.

Cameroonian health officials are asking people with confirmed and suspected cholera cases to refrain from seeking treatment from African traditional healers.
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A warming climate could bring viruses in the Arctic into contact with new environments and hosts, increasing the risk of “viral spillover,” according to research published Wednesday.

Viruses need hosts like humans, animals, plants or fungi to replicate and spread, and occasionally they can jump to a new one that lacks immunity, as seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Scientists in Canada wanted to investigate how climate change might affect spillover risk by examining samples from the Arctic landscape of Lake Hazen.

It is the largest lake in the world entirely north of the Arctic Circle and “was truly unlike any other place I’ve been,” researcher Graham Colby, now a medical student at the University of Toronto, told AFP.

The team sampled soil that becomes a riverbed for melted glacier water in the summer, as well as the lakebed itself — which required clearing snow and drilling through 2 meters of ice, even in May when the research was carried out.

They used ropes and a snowmobile to lift the lake sediment through almost 300 meters of water, and samples were then sequenced for DNA and RNA, the genetic blueprints and messengers of life.

“This enabled us to know what viruses are in a given environment, and what potential hosts are also present,” said Stephane Aris-Brosou, an associate professor in the University of Ottawa’s biology department, who led the work.

But to find out how likely they were to jump hosts, the team needed to examine the equivalent of each virus and host’s family tree.

“Basically, what we tried to do is measure how similar these trees are,” said Audree Lemieux, first author of the research.

Similar genealogies suggest a virus has evolved along with its host, but differences suggest spillover. And if a virus has jumped hosts once, it is more likely to do so again.

‘Very unpredictable’

The analysis found pronounced differences between viruses and hosts in the lakebed, “which is directly correlated to the risk of spillover,” said Aris-Brosou.

The difference was less stark in the riverbeds, which the researchers theorize is because water erodes the topsoil, removing organisms and limiting interactions between viruses and potential new hosts.

Those, instead, wash into the lake, which has seen “dramatic change” in recent years, the study says, as increased water from melting glaciers deposits more sediment.

“That’s going to bring together hosts and viruses that would not normally encounter each other,” Lemieux said.

The authors of the research, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences journal, caution they are neither forecasting an actual spillover nor a pandemic.

“The likelihood of dramatic events remains very low,” Lemieux said.

They also warn more work is needed to clarify how big the difference between viruses and hosts needs to be to create serious spillover risk.

But they argue that warming weather could increase risks further if new potential hosts move into previously inhospitable regions.

“It could be anything from ticks to mosquitoes to certain animals, to bacteria and viruses themselves,” said Lemieux.

“It’s really unpredictable … and the effect of spillover itself is very unpredictable. It can range from benign to an actual pandemic.”

The team wants more research and surveillance work in the region to understand the risks.

“Obviously, we’ve seen in the past two years what the effects of spillover can be,” said Lemieux.
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There are only about 1,000 mountain gorillas left in the wild and they live in only three countries — the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. To encourage tourists and locals to help protect the endangered gorillas, Rwanda has turned to social media platform Instagram with a project they call GorillaGram. Senanu Tord reports from Kinigi, Rwanda. Videographer: Senanu Tord   
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Who said there is nothing new under the sun? 

One of the hottest innovations for the non-polluting generation of electricity is floating photo-voltaics, or FPV, which involves anchoring solar panels in bodies of water, especially lakes, reservoirs and seas. Some projects in Asia incorporate thousands of panels to generate hundreds of megawatts.

FPV got a head start in Asia and Europe where it makes a lot of economic sense with open land highly valued for agriculture.

The first modest systems were installed in Japan and at a California winery in 2007 and 2008.  

On land, a one-megawatt projects requires between one and 1.6 hectares.  

Floating solar projects are even more attractive when they can be built on bodies of water adjacent to hydropower plants with existing transmission lines. 

Most of the largest such projects are in China and India. There also are large-scale facilities in Brazil, Portugal and Singapore.

A proposed 2.1 gigawatt floating solar farm on a tidal flat on the coast of the Yellow Sea in South Korea, which would contain five million solar modules over an area covering 30 square kilometers with a $4 billion price tag, is facing an uncertain future with a new government in Seoul. President Yoon Suk-yeol has indicated he prefers to boost nuclear over solar power. 

Other gigawatt-scale projects are moving off the drawing board in India and Laos, as well as the North Sea, off the Dutch coast. 

The technology has also excited planners in sub-Saharan Africa with the lowest electricity access rate in the world and an abundance of sunshine. 

In countries that depend on a lot of hydropower, “there’s concerns around what does power generation look like during droughts, for example, and with climate change, we expect that we’ll see more extreme weather events. When we’re thinking about droughts, there is the opportunity to then have FPV as another renewable energy option in your toolkit essentially,” explained Sika Gadzanku, a researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. “So instead of depending so much on hydro, now you can use more FPV and reduce your dependence on hydro, during very dry seasons, to use your floating solar photovoltaics.”  

A one percent coverage of hydropower reservoirs with floating solar panels could provide an increase of 50 percent of the annual production of existing hydroelectric plants in Africa, according to a study funded by the European Commission.

Challenges

There are potential flotovoltaic hazards, however. A plant caught fire in Chiba prefecture in Japan in 2019. Officials blamed a typhoon for shifting panels one atop another, generating intense heat and possibly sparking the fire at the 18-hectare facility containing more than 50,000 floating solar panels at the Yamakura Dam.

The most significant barrier to wider adoption of the technology, at present, is the price. It is more expensive to construct a floating array than a similarly sized installation on land. But with the higher costs there are additional benefits: Due to passive cooling of water bodies, the floating panels can function more effectively than conventional solar panels. They also reduce light exposure and lower the water temperature, minimizing harmful algae growth.

That all sounded promising to officials in the town of Windsor in northern California’s wine country. Nearly 5,000 solar panels, each generating 360 watts of electricity, are now floating on one of Windsor’s wastewater ponds.

“They’re all interlinked. Each panel gets its own float. And they actually move quite well with wave action and wind action,” . You’d be surprised how they can kind of just suck up the waves and ride them out without breaking or coming apart,” said Garrett Broughton, the senior civil engineer for Windsor’s public works department.   

The floating panels are easy on the environment and Windsor’s budget, in which the wastewater plant’s electric bill was the town government’s largest

Town Council member Deborah Fudge pushed for the 1.78-megawatt project over an alternative of putting solar panels atop carports.

“They offset 350 metric tons of carbon dioxide yearly. And they also provide 90 percent of the power that we need for all of the operations for treating wastewater, for all the operations of our corporation yard and also for pumping our wastewater to the geysers, which, is a geothermal field, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) north,” Fudge told VOA. 

The town leases the floating panels from the company that installed them, which gives it a set price for electricity on a long-term contract, meaning Windsor is paying about 30 percent of what it previously spent for the same amount of power.

“It’s not like we’ve invested in something where we’re not going to get a payback. We’re getting a payback as we speak. And we’ll get a payback for 25 years,” said Windsor’s mayor, Sam Salmon. 

The floating systems are not intended to fully blanket bodies of water, allowing for other activities to continue, such as boating and fishing. 

“We do not assume the floating structure will cover the whole water body, it’s often a very small percentage of that water body,” NREL’s Gadzanku told VOA. “Even just from a visual perspective you don’t want to maybe see PV panels covering an entire reservoir.”

NREL has identified 24,419 man-made bodies of water in the United States as suitable for FPV placement. Floating panels covering little more than one-fourth the area of each these sites would potentially generate nearly 10 percent of America’s energy needs, according to the lab.

Among the sites is the 119-hectare Smith Lake, a man-made reservoir managed by Stafford County in Virginia to produce drinking water. It is also a site for recreational fishing adjacent to the U.S. Marine Corps’ Quantico base.  

“Many of these eligible bodies of water are in water-stressed areas with high land acquisition costs and high electricity prices, suggesting multiple benefits of FP technologies,” wrote the study’s authors. 

“It really is an option with a lot of proven technology behind it,” said Gadzanku.
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Long distance runners rely on endurance, determination and the ability to see. Today, steps are being taken to help runners with disabilities, including those who are blind or partially sighted, to compete. Andri Tambunan reports for VOA in this report narrated by Zulfian Bakar. Videographer: Andri Tambunan, Maria Iman-Santoso
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Relentless drought in China, East Africa, the U.S. West and northern Mexico, devastating floods in Pakistan and Kentucky, scorching heat waves in Europe and the Pacific Northwest, destructive cyclones in southern Africa and intense hurricanes in the U.S. and Central America make up just some of the recent extreme weather events that scientists have long predicted would be more intense with a warming climate.

“With just over one degree of warming since pre-industrial times, we are already seeing more extreme weather patterns,” said Elizabeth Robinson, director of the Grantham Research Institute in London.

Scientists have been tracking precisely how much the climate has already changed due to human activity. Temperatures around the world have been inching upwards.

The average global temperature today, which tends to be compared to estimates for the pre-industrial era that kickstarted the mass burning of fossil fuels, has shot up between 0.9 and 1.2 degrees Celsius (1.6 to 2 degrees Fahrenheit) since 1850, in large part due to human activity, according to estimates in the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Most of that warming has happened from 1975 onwards, at a rate of 0.15 Celsius (0.27 Fahrenheit) to 0.2 Celsius (0.36 Fahrenheit) per decade.

Most people are living in areas that have heated up more than the global average, “partly that is urbanization — people move into cities, which are urban heat islands — and partly populations growing,” Robinson said. Urban areas, packed with plenty of heat-absorbing infrastructure like roads and buildings and less cooling tree cover, become “islands” of warmer weather.

Sea levels, which have swelled due to both warming, expanding oceans and the melting of ice over land, have also been jumping up more rapidly. In the twentieth century, seas were rising by about 1.4 millimeters (0.06 inches) a year, but that’s doubled to 3.6 millimeters a year (0.14 inches) in the past fifteen years, data suggests. Seas have risen by about 21 to 24 centimeters (8 to 9 inches) so far since 1880 on average, according to estimates, with the IPCC suggesting this will likely be up to 43 to 84 centimeters (17 to 33 inches) by 2100.

While the climate and global temperatures have fluctuated throughout the Earth’s history, it is the rate of change that is most alarming to researchers. Fossil fuels — made up of ancient decomposing plants and animals deep in the earth — have been dug up at extraordinary rates. Scientists are now starting to pinpoint “details about rates and magnitudes and timing of changes” as well as the varying impact on regions, said Brown University climate scientist Kim Cobb.

With the planet already facing the effects of climate change, adapting to hazards is one major way humans can limit the damage. Weather-related disaster deaths are generally trending lower globally as forecasts, preparedness and resilience improves, scientists say.

“The extent to which people are harmed by an extreme weather event is strongly influenced by government policies,” Robinson said, but added that “there are limits to adaptation.”
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