Seoul, South Korea — A much-heralded first meeting between South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and a negotiator for young doctors who walked off the job in February appeared to have made little progress on Thursday after the latter expressed pessimism on social media.  

Yoon’s office said his first in-person talks lasted more than two hours, after he showed the first signs of flexibility in an approach until now marked by a hard-line attitude, as crucial parliament elections approach next week.

“There is no future for medical care in Korea,” the negotiator, Park Dan, posted on his Facebook page after the meeting at which Yoon’s office said the two exchanged views on improving working conditions and compensation for the doctors.

It was not immediately clear what aspect of the talks Park was referring to. Reuters has sent him a text message to seek comment.  

The long drawn-out walkout by thousands of trainee doctors nationwide is putting increasing strain on South Korea’s health care system, forcing hospitals to turn away patients and cut back on surgeries except in emergencies.

Park, the head of the Korean Intern Resident Association, accepted Yoon’s invitation to meet and conveyed the views of his colleagues, Yoon’s office said in its brief statement.

It added that Yoon would respect the position of the trainee doctors in future discussions with the medical community on health care reform, including an increase in physician numbers.

The centerpiece of Yoon’s contested plan is to boost medical school admissions and the number of doctors in a rapidly aging society, but many are instead concerned about securing better working conditions and legal protection.

Unless action is taken, South Korea faces having 15,000 fewer doctors than it needs to maintain essential services, the government has warned.

Yoon had said his plan to raise the number of new medical students to 5,000 a year from 3,000 now is not up for discussion but signaled on Monday there might be room to adjust it if the medical community offered reasonable proposals.  

South Korea’s practicing physicians and teachers in medical school have demanded that Yoon scrap his reform plans.  

While a large majority of the public support the thrust of Yoon’s plan, a poll on Monday showed more people are unhappy with the way his government has handled the stalemate.

South Koreans go to the polls on April 10 to elect a 300-member parliament and Yoon’s conservative People Power Party faces an uphill battle to win back a majority now held by the opposition.
…

On Earth and in space, efforts are underway to curb emissions of the super-pollutant methane, a greenhouse gas. VOA’s Veronica Balderas Iglesias looks at the latest innovations and policies, as the International Energy Agency warns the clock is ticking to win the fight against climate change.
…

Harare, Zimbabwe — Zimbabwe appealed to the United Nations, aid agencies and individuals on Wednesday for $2 billion to avert food insecurity caused by an El Nino-induced drought.

At the State House in Harare, President Emmerson Mnangagwa declared a nationwide state of disaster. He told reporters that Zimbabwe is expecting a harvest of 868,000 metric tons of grain this year — far short of expectations and about 680,000 tons less than the country needs.

“Preliminary assessment shows that Zimbabwe requires in excess of $2 billion toward various interventions we envisage in the spectrum of our national response,” he said.

Zimbabwe isn’t alone. Malawi and Zambia declared a state of disaster earlier this year due to the drought.

Edward Kallon, U.N. resident and humanitarian coordinator in Zimbabwe, said the world body is monitoring the severe impact of the ongoing dry spell in southern Africa. He said the crisis has far-reaching consequences across various sectors, including food and nutrition security, health, water resources, education and jobs.

So far, Kallon said, the U.N. has allocated $5 million from the Central Emergency Response Fund for needs such as water, hygiene, sanitation, food and medical response to a cholera outbreak.

“The U.N. pledges its support to the government of Zimbabwe in mobilizing resources to tackle the El Nino-induced drought,” he said. “Efforts are underway to finalize a response plan.”

Paul Zakariya, executive director of the Zimbabwe Farmers Union, said that while nothing can be done to stop climate change effects, irrigation farming is one of the methods that can be used to mitigate calamity.

“Only depending on rain-fed agriculture, we will not go too far,” Zakariya said.

The government should ensure that even farmers with small amounts of land can irrigate, he said.

“With irrigation, our farmers are producing all year round,” he said.

Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of southern Africa, has largely depended on handouts from organizations such as the World Food Program and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the last 20-plus years.

The government attributes the food shortages to recurring droughts.

Critics attribute the problem to the confiscation of land from white commercial farmers who produced crops all year round. They were replaced with peasant farmers who let irrigation systems fall into disrepair and are reliant on rain to grow their crops.

U.N. agencies said they will provide funding so Zimbabwe can revive the irrigation systems. Details are expected at a news conference on Thursday.
…

…

…

ATLANTA — A person in Texas has been diagnosed with bird flu, an infection tied to the recent discovery of the virus in dairy cows, health officials said Monday.

The patient was being treated with an antiviral drug and their only reported symptom was eye redness, Texas health officials said. Health officials say the person had been in contact with cows presumed to be infected, and the risk to the public remains low. 

It marks the first known instance globally of a person catching this version of bird flu from a mammal, federal health officials said.

However, there’s no evidence of person-to-person spread or that anyone has become infected from milk or meat from livestock, said Dr. Nirav Shah, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Genetic tests don’t suggest that the virus suddenly is spreading more easily or that it is causing more severe illness, Shah said. And current antiviral medications still seem to work, he added.

Last week, dairy cows in Texas and Kansas were reported to be infected with bird flu — and federal agriculture officials later confirmed infections in a Michigan dairy herd that had recently received cows from Texas. None of the hundreds of affected cows have died, Shah said.

Since 2020, a bird flu virus has been spreading among more animal species – including dogs, cats, skunks, bears and even seals and porpoises – in scores of countries. 

However, the detection in U.S. livestock is an “unexpected and problematic twist,” said Dr. Ali Khan, a former CDC outbreak investigator who is now dean of the University of Nebraska’s public health college.

This bird flu was first identified as a threat to people during a 1997 outbreak in Hong Kong. More than 460 people have died in the past two decades from bird flu infections, according to the World Health Organization. 

Most infected people got it directly from birds, but scientists have been on guard for any sign of spread among people. 

Texas officials didn’t identify the newly infected person, nor release any details about what brought them in contact with the cows.

The CDC does not recommend testing for people who have no symptoms. Roughly a dozen people in Texas who did have symptoms were tested in connection with the dairy cow infections, but only the one person came back positive, Shah said.

It’s only the second time a person in the United States has been diagnosed with what’s known as Type A H5N1 virus. In 2022, a prison inmate in a work program picked it up while killing infected birds at a poultry farm in Montrose County, Colorado. His only symptom was fatigue, and he recovered.
…

islamabad, pakistan — Global eradication efforts have “cornered” polio in a “few pockets” of Pakistan and Afghanistan, the last two countries where the virus continues to paralyze children.

Experts hailed the progress being made in tackling the “outbreak-prone” disease during a virtual briefing last week to mark a decade since India was declared polio-free in March 2014.

“We have Pakistan and Afghanistan [where polio is] still endemic, but the virus is cornered in very few pockets in very few districts of these two countries,” said Dr. Ananda Bandyopadhyay, deputy director of polio technology, research and analytics at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

“The virus is gasping in these last corridors,” Bandyopadhyay said.

Pakistan has reported two wild poliovirus cases this year, while the number stood at six in 2023. Afghanistan has yet to detect a polio case this year and recorded six cases last year.

Experts credited continued efforts to vaccinate populations with pushing polio to the verge of extinction.

Wild poliovirus affects young children and can paralyze them in severe cases or can be deadly in certain instances. The paralytic disease is the only currently designated public health emergency of international concern.

Hamid Jafari, director of polio eradication for the WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region, told the event that until 2020, about 13 families of wild poliovirus had spread across the neighboring countries.

Since then, only two families have survived, and they remain endemic to Pakistan “in a very small geographic area” in southern parts of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa border province and in eastern Afghanistan, he said.

While the “historic reservoirs” have been cleared of the virus in Pakistan and Afghanistan, transmission is now surviving in “exceptionally hard-to-reach” populations, making it difficult for polio teams to inoculate children there, he said.

Jafari said “militancy and extensive population movement” across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and keeping track of those populations, were the kinds of “last-mile challenges that we have.”

“The genetic cluster that seems to be on its way out and getting eliminated is in the heart of the area of militancy in Pakistan,” he said.

Jafari noted that India’s polio program did not face the same militancy challenge that Afghanistan’s did until the Taliban takeover in August 2021, and that it remains a significant problem in Pakistan in the last stages of eradicating the virus.

Bandyopadhyay said successes against the poliovirus in both countries raise hope it is on the verge of extinction there.

He said clinicians “observed similar trends” even in the countries that “saw polio’s disappearing act.”

“Initially, we would have multiple families or lineages of the virus … and then you saw that disappearing act,” he said.

Jafari said that lessons learned in India had been applied to Nigeria, which was declared polio-free in June 2020. He added that many of “these practices were instilled in the program” in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

WHO has said that cases caused by wild poliovirus have dropped by more than 99% since 1988, from an estimated 350,000 in more than 125 endemic countries to just two endemic countries as of October 2023.

It attributed the decline to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, led by the WHO, the U.N. Children’s Fund, Rotary International, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Jay Wenger, director of the polio program at the Gates Foundation, said that even though Afghanistan and Pakistan had reported a handful of cases, global efforts against the virus must continue.

“As we get to the end of the [polio program], it’s critical to finish. We usually say if there is polio anywhere, it’s a threat to everywhere,” he said.
…

…