YCLOAK

Sleep deprivation has been linked to weakened immune systems and could cost the U.S. economy hundreds of billions, so it is no wonder many Americans are looking to apps to help them sleep.

A new analysis of the 35 popular apps available to download has led researchers to say the apps need improvement.

There are hundreds of sleep apps available for Android devices or iPhones, most use soothing sounds to help people fall asleep. But researchers say less than half of the apps they looked at offered any “general information about sleep” or explain the hazards of not getting enough sleep.

“We were surprised that some of the apps didn’t say anything about the recommended amount of sleep someone should get on a regular basis,” said University of Illinois kinesiology and community health professor Diana Grigsby-Toussaint, who led the new analysis with colleagues at the New York University School of Medicine . “And there weren’t a lot of apps that had any information about the benefits of sleep.”

They also looked at whether the apps “include reminder messages to help users meet their sleep goals,” where they linked to social media so that the user could get positive reinforcement from friends, and did they provide information about what habits enhanced or interfered with sleep.

Most importantly, did the apps help the users sleep?

“From a population health perspective, I really see this as how do we use these apps in terms of educating people about the importance of sleep,” she said. “And how do you then use the apps as a tool to help people to get to that point where they do engage in healthy sleeping habits?”

According to the researchers, many of the apps were well designed, but “just four of the 35 apps described the health risks associated with not getting enough sleep, like high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity and depression.”

Just four provided information about habits that can cause sleep problems such as drinking alcohol or caffeine before bedtime. Only six had “sleep reminders,” and only one “included rewards or praise for success in reaching one’s goals.”

The analysis was published in the journal Preventive Medicine Reports.
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Much like human soldiers in combat, members of a large, black, termite-eating ant species found in sub-Saharan Africa march in formation into battle and afterward retrieve wounded comrades and carry them back home to recover.

Scientists on Wednesday described the unique rescue behavior of the African Matabele ants, called Megaponera analis, after observing them in Ivory Coast’s Comoé National Park, but did not ascribe charitable motives to the insects.

“This is not an altruistic behavior,” said entomologist Erik Frank of the University of Würzburg in Germany, who led the research published in the journal Science Advances.

“The ants do not help the injured out of the goodness of their hearts. There is a clear benefit for the colony: these injured ants are able to participate again in future raids and remain a functioning member of the colony.”

The ants, which get up to almost three-quarters of an inch (2 cm) long, specialize in hunting termites and use a distinctive raiding strategy.

Scouts leave the nest in search of termite-foraging sites, then recruit up to 500 nest mates and lead them to the termites in a column formation. Ants injured while fighting with termites, sometimes losing limbs or becoming disabled when termites cling to them, excrete pheromone chemicals from their bodies to signal comrades for help.

Uninjured ants then hoist up the wounded and carry them, as well as the dead termites, back to the nest in the same column formation, sometimes as far as about 165 feet (50 meters).

Once back at the nest, other ants remove termites that may be grasping the injured ants. Ants that lost one or two of their six legs are able to adapt their locomotion, often regaining running speeds similar to a healthy ant within 24 hours.

Nearly all the rescued ants participated in subsequent raids, sometimes less than an hour after being injured.

Frank said he was surprised to find this behavior in an invertebrate species.

“It first sounded illogical to me why they should evolve this type of helping behavior,” Frank said. “After a closer look, we realized that the good of the individual, saving the injured, can also be for the good of the colony, and that individuals can be very valuable in ants.”

In addition to primates such as apes and monkeys, rescue behavior has been seen in certain other mammals including elephants, rats and dolphins, Frank said.
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Scientists are touting a discovery that they think might cure HIV infection. They’ve engineered an antibody that blocks the virus from entering and infecting key immune system cells.

 

The process, developed at the Scripps Researcher Institute in California, involves tethering an antibody, which fights infection, directly onto T cells, the immune system cells that are targeted by the AIDS virus. Eventually, if enough immune cells become infected and destroyed by HIV, the disease progresses to AIDS, which leads to certain death. The antibodies, however, block the receptor on the T cells that HIV uses to enter and destroy them.

 

It’s what immunochemist Richard Lerner called a form of “cellular vaccination.”  He said the genetic alteration of the T cells with tethered antibodies does not interfere with the immune cells’ ability to fight other pathogens.

 

Lerner is the senior author of a study describing the work in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

Experimental HIV vaccines attempt to stimulate an immune response, creating HIV-specific antibodies to attack and destroy infected cells. But Lerner says the concentration of antibodies flowing freely in the bloodstream is too low to reach every infected T cell.

 

‘Survival of the fittest’

This approach is different, protecting only some healthy T cells.

“You don’t really care about the rest of the body,” Lerner explained. “You would just like to shield those cells from viruses and a virus attack. So that’s the chemical principle. Never mind immunizing the whole body. Just immunize the cells that are the real victims.”

His team added a gene to T cells which instructed them to synthesize antibodies that would bind with the cellular receptor called CD4. That is the doorway to the cell for HIV. Having antibodies hanging on to the cell surface blocks that doorway.

 

It’s hoped that eventually in humans, these HIV-resistant cells will multiply into the millions, passing on the protective gene, as the unprotected, infected cells die off, eradicating the AIDS virus from the body and affording a long-lasting cure.

 

At least that’s what experiments in the laboratory suggested when both genetically engineered and unprotected human T cells were exposed to HIV.

 

Lerner said the engineered T cells would be introduced into a patient’s bone marrow, which would produce protective cells en masse.  

 

“We hope to, after securing their safety and so on and so forth, in a patient with HIV, [the engineered cells] can harm their [infected] cells with [the] resistance of ours, and … hopefully the good cells will be selected over the bad cells. And that will be the end of HIV in that patient,” Lerner said.

 It’s an approach that Lerner calls a Darwinian “survival of the fittest.”

 

Scripps investigators are working with City of Hope, an independent research and comprehensive cancer treatment center in Duarte, California, that has a lot of experience with bone marrow transplantation. The center will carry out clinical trials of the engineered, HIV-resistant T cells with an eye toward advancing what scientists hope will be a cure for AIDS.
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Scientists have identified the oldest-known forerunner of the dinosaurs and are expressing surprise at how little it actually resembled one.

Researchers on Wednesday described fossils of a long-necked, four-legged, meat-eating reptile called Teleocrater rhadinus that reached up to 10 feet (3 meters) long and prowled a Tanzanian floodplain roughly 245 million years ago.

It lived during the Triassic Period millions of years before the first dinosaurs. Scientists called it a close cousin rather than a direct dinosaur ancestor.

Its appearance differed from what scientists had expected from the earliest representatives of the dinosaur evolutionary lineage. Teleocrater possessed an unexpected combination of crocodile-like and dinosaur-like characteristics.

“I’m surprised by the mosaic of features that it possesses,” said paleontologist Ken Angielczyk of the Field Museum in Chicago, one of the researchers in the study published in the journal Nature.

“In terms of how it shakes up our understanding of dinosaur evolution, Teleocrater shows that the earliest members of the dinosaur lineage were very unlike dinosaurs, and that many ‘typical’ features of dinosaurs accumulated in a step-wise fashion instead of all evolving at close to the same time.”

Dinosaurs belong to a larger group called archosaurs that about 250 million years ago cleaved into two branches: crocodilians in one and another that includes dinosaurs, extinct flying reptiles called pterosaurs, and birds, which evolved from feathered dinosaurs.

Teleocrater is the oldest-known member of the dinosaur-pterosaur-bird archosaur branch.

Scientists had expected such a dinosaur forerunner to be a smallish, two-legged predator resembling early dinosaurs such as Herrerasaurus, which lived about 231 million years ago in Argentina. While dinosaur predators were bipedal, Teleocrater instead was four-legged, looking superficially like a modern Komodo dragon.

Virginia Tech paleontologist Sterling Nesbitt, the study’s lead author, said fossils representing at least four individuals were found in southern Tanzania, representing about half the skeleton.

Much like a croc and unlike a dinosaur, Teleocrater’s ankle joints could rotate from side to side as well as flexing up and down, providing a crocodile-like gait.

It also boasted telltale dinosaur features such as characteristic depressions for jaw muscle attachment on the roof of the skull, extra surfaces for the backbones to attach to one another, and distinctive hip muscle attachments on the thigh bone.

Teleocrater’s remains were found in the same Tanzanian region as fossils of the two-legged meat-eater Nyasasaurus, which lived perhaps a couple of million years later. Some scientists regard Nyasasaurus as the earliest-known dinosaur.
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A Russian cosmonaut who has returned to Earth after a mission on the International Space Station said on Wednesday he had taken a relic of a Russian Orthodox saint with him.

Astronauts and cosmonauts routinely take small items such as their children’s toys or CDs with them as reminders of home.

Sergei Ryzhikov told Russian news agencies that he would give the tiny relic of St. Serafim of Sarov’s body, which he received from its home monastery last year, to an Orthodox church in Star City outside Moscow, home to the cosmonaut training center.

Serafim of Sarov, one of Russia’s most revered saints known for his hermitical lifestyle, died in the early 19th century.

Ryzhikov, who came back with two other crew members on Monday after six months in space, said he would celebrate the relic’s return at a church service in Star City on Thursday.

“We always wait for some sort of miracle, but the fact that a piece of the relics traveled to the orbit and blesses everything onboard and outside, including our planet, is a big miracle in itself,” he said.

Space exploration in atheist Soviet society was often portrayed as debunking the existence of God. A popular Soviet-era propaganda poster showed a cosmonaut floating in space and declaring: “There is no God!”

Russia has since experienced a religious revival, with the overwhelming majority of Russians now identifying themselves as Russian Orthodox.

In what would have seemed an absurdity to fiercely atheist Soviet space pioneers, Soyuz spacecraft now routinely receive pre-launch blessings from Orthodox priests and Russian cosmonauts have put up small icons at the Space Station.

Cosmonauts have taken tiny relics of at least six Orthodox saints and a piece of the Holy Cross into space with them.

Russia celebrates Space Day on April 12, exactly 56 years after Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel into space.

 
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A shrimp that uses a very loud sound to stun its prey has been named after legendary rock band Pink Floyd.

The Synalpheus pinkfloydi, a kind of pistol shrimp, has an oversized pink claw, which, when snapped, creates a blast that’s louder than a gunshot.

Sammy de Grave of Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History, who named the shrimp, combined the loudness, the pink color and his love for Pink Floyd to come up with the name.

“I have been listening to Floyd since The Wall was released in 1979, when I was 14 years old. I’ve seen them play live several times since, including the Hyde Park reunion gig for Live 8 in 2005,” he told The Telegraph newspaper, referencing the anti-poverty benefit concerts. “The description of this new species of pistol shrimp was the perfect opportunity to finally give a nod to my favorite band.”

When Synalpheus pinkfloydi snaps its claw, it creates a “high-pressure cavitation bubble which collapses to produce one of the loudest sounds in the ocean,” The Telegraph reported. The sound can be as loud as 210 decibels, which is enough to stun or kill small fish.

The bubble is also hot, reaching temperatures as high as 4,400 degrees Celsius.

This is not the first time de Grave has named a crustacean after his love of rock and roll, the BBC reports. The Elephantis jaggerai is a tribute to Mick Jagger, front man of the Rolling Stones.

De Grave’s description of the shrimp, which was discovered off the Pacific coast of Panama, was published in the journal Zootaxa.
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Guinea worm is on course to become the second human disease to be eradicated, after smallpox, thanks largely to intervention overseen by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Little was known about the infection for decades, as diseases like malaria took priority. However, previously unpublished research from the 1970s, released this month, shows the burden the disease has had on millions of people.

Watch: Jimmy Carter Leads Push to Eradicate Guinea Worrm

Guinea worm is contracted when people drink water contaminated with tiny crustaceans that contain the worm larvae. A year later, a meter-long female worm emerges through a painful blister, often disabling the infected person for months.

Professor Brian Greenwood, a British scientist, first came across Guinea worm in the 1970s when working in northern Nigeria. He says little was known about the disease, despite millions suffering from it across Africa and India.

“People were much more concerned with malaria, bilharzia and other tropical infections,” Greenwood said. “And part of the reason was that these people were so disabled they never got to the clinic or the hospital. So that if you looked in hospital records, you did not see this as a big problem.”

Greenwood spent four years studying the disease and trying to find out why sufferers often developed repeat infections, without developing immunity.

“We extracted some of the worms,” he said. “And the traditional way is winding them out on a matchstick, just gradually. And the problem is that if the worm then snapped inside, then they got a very severe reaction.”

Greenwood credits the Carter Center, a charitable foundation set up by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, for helping fight the disease to the brink of eradication.

There is no vaccine or treatment. Instead, community education programs teach people to filter drinking water and avoid entering water sources. 

Speaking in 2011, Carter described the initial difficulties.

“It was kind of an insult to say ‘this disease comes out of your pond,'” he said. “So we have had to do a lot of diplomacy and convincing the people there to take care of their own problems. Well, it has worked. And now almost every nation on earth has eradicated or eliminated Guinea worm.”

When the Carter Center first became involved in 1986, there were around 3.5 million cases in 21 countries; last year, 25 cases were recorded in only three countries — Chad, Ethiopia and South Sudan.

Greenwood’s early study of Guinea worm remained unpublished, as he was directed to focus on malaria and meningitis instead; but last year in London, he met Carter, who persuaded him to publish the research.

“I hope that we have been able to document what a horrible disease this was,” Greenwood said. “And it is really important that people realize that. And if we do get eradication in the next year or two, which I hope will be the case, that this will not just be seen as a minor thing, but to be a really very important public health triumph.”

The last few cases of Guinea worm remain because they are the most difficult to reach. Many are in conflict areas like South Sudan, but scientists are optimistic this ancient disease can be eradicated within the next few years.
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Another “Great Spot” has been found at Jupiter, this one cold and high up.

Scientists reported Tuesday that the dark expanse is 15,000 miles (24,000 kilometers) across and 7,500 miles (12,000 kilometers) wide. It’s in the upper atmosphere and much cooler than the hot surroundings, thus the name Great Cold Spot. And unlike the giant planet’s familiar Great Red Spot, this newly discovered weather system is continually changing in shape and size. It’s formed by the energy from Jupiter’s polar auroras.

A British-led team used a telescope in Chile to chart the temperature and density of Jupiter’s atmosphere. When the researchers compared the data with thousands of images taken in years past by a telescope in Hawaii, the Great Cold Spot stood out. It could be thousands of years old.

“The Great Cold Spot is much more volatile than the slowly changing Great Red Spot … but it has reappeared for as long as we have data to search for it, for over 15 years,” the University of Leicester’s Tom Stallard, lead author of the study, said in a statement.

Stallard said Jupiter’s upper atmosphere may hold other features. Scientists will be on the lookout for them while also studying the Great Cold Spot in greater detail, using ground telescopes as well as NASA’s Juno spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter, he said.

The study was published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
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Climate change could cause stronger turbulence for airline passengers, according to a new study.

Researchers at the University of Reading in England say “turbulence strong enough to catapult unbuckled passengers and crew around the aircraft cabin” could become two or three times more common.

“For most passengers, light turbulence is nothing more than an annoying inconvenience that reduces their comfort levels, but for nervous fliers even light turbulence can be distressing,” said Paul Williams, who conducted the research. “However, even the most seasoned frequent fliers may be alarmed at the prospect of a 149 percent increase in severe turbulence, which frequently hospitalizes air travelers and flight attendants around the world.”

Specifically, researchers used supercomputer models to look at how wintertime transatlantic clear-air turbulence at an altitude of 12 kilometers will change when there is twice as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which could happen by the end of this century.

The models show light turbulence could increase by 59 percent, light-to-moderate turbulence could jump by 75 percent, moderate-to-severe turbulence could rise by 127 percent and severe turbulence could bounce a whopping 149 percent.

The reason, according to the researchers is that climate change “is generating stronger wind shears in the jet stream.”

“Our new study paints the most detailed picture yet of how aircraft turbulence will respond to climate change,” said Williams.

The study is published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.
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An independent U.S. panel of experts has changed course on its recommendation against routine PSA screening of men for prostate cancer.

In a draft recommendation, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force said men between the ages of 55 and 69 should be screened using the prostate-specific antigen test on an “individualized” basis. The panel concluded, in its new guidance, that the potential benefits of screening slightly outweighed the harm.

The new draft guidelines echo those of several leading medical groups, but they don’t make the decision any easier for men: With their doctor’s help, they have to decide whether to take an imperfect PSA test that carries a small chance of detecting a deadly cancer and a larger chance of triggering unneeded worry and treatment with serious side effects.

 

“This isn’t a one-size-fits-all” recommendation, said the panel’s chair, Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, a San Francisco internist who already follows the advice and discusses the potential pros and cons with her patients.

Men whose greatest concern is reducing their chances of dying from cancer are sometimes willing to face the consequences and choose testing. “Other men will realize the likely benefit is small and aren’t willing to risk the harms,” she said.

Controversial call

In a 2012 recommendation that caused controversy within the medical community, the task force expressed concern that routine use of the PSA test was leading to unnecessary biopsies and other tests in men suspected of having prostate cancer.

Critics of that recommendation worried that as a result of any reduction in testing, prostate cancer might be diagnosed at a more advanced stage in some men.

According to new data released by the task force, the test would let three men out of 1,000 avoid metastatic cancer and would prevent one to two prostate cancer deaths in 1,000.

The revised guidance is based on the findings of the European Randomized Study of Screening for Prostate Cancer.  

A longer follow-up period revealed that slightly more men in the 55-69 age group benefited from screening when the disease was suspected.

‘Thoughtful’ policy

The American Urological Association is hailing the proposed new recommendation as “thoughtful and reasonable.”  But the association expressed concern that, under the guidelines, men 70 and older would not be screened for prostate cancer.

A statement issued by the association said, “We believe that selected older healthier men may garner a benefit from prostate cancer screening,” even though the group acknowledged there is limited evidence that men in this age group benefit from the PSA test.

The revised draft recommendation is open to public comment before a final recommendation is issued.

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is a national independent volunteer panel of medical experts created in 1984. It is funded, staffed and appointed by an agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The task force is charged with making “evidence-based” recommendations about clinical preventive services, including health screenings, counseling services and preventive medications.

Some information for this report came from AP.
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Industrial air pollution causes nearly 3.5 million deaths a year, and international trade is shifting some of the harmful effects from consuming nations to producing nations, according to a study in the journal Nature.  

The authors say high consumption in the United States and Western Europe harms health in manufacturing countries such as China, and the pattern is continuing among developing nations in Asia.

“Take an example of a toy,” says Steve Davis, an Earth system scientist with the University of California, Irvine, and one of the report’s authors.  He explains that toys sold in America are most often made in China, displacing the emissions that would otherwise be released in the United States.  

“We’re effectively outsourcing the pollution that comes from the manufacture of that product,” he said.

750,000 premature deaths

Worldwide, the scientists estimate air pollution produced by exported goods and services caused more than 750,000 premature deaths in the baseline year of the study, 2007.

The report by Davis and his colleagues at Beijing’s Tsinghua University and other institutions found the cross-border effects of trade-related pollution is greater than the cross-boundary impact of industrial pollution caused by weather patterns.

Particulate matter from China was linked to 65,000 premature deaths outside of China, largely in Japan and the Korean peninsula, and including 3,100 deaths in the United States and Western Europe.  But U.S. and European consumption of goods produced in China was linked to nearly 110,000 premature deaths in China.

The researchers say that as China becomes a consuming society, its manufacturing is shifting, but the pattern is similar, as production and pollution are “outsourced by China into other up-and-coming industrialized countries like Cambodia, Vietnam, India,” said Davis.

Those countries are bearing the health costs.

The study examined 13 regions of the world and Davis said researchers were surprised levels of harm from emissions that were displaced from one country to another by outsourcing.

Trump order criticized

Davis notes that China’s industrial cities are plagued with pollution, and the country is working to clean up its air.  Yet as China expands its use of “scrubbers” that remove fine particulate matter from industrial emissions, environmentalist are accusing President Donald Trump of reversing the U.S. commitment to clean air.  On March 28, Trump signed a sweeping executive order to increase America’s energy independence and boost American jobs by reducing the federal government’s role in controlling emissions.

“There’s a concern that in the pursuit of economic gains, we’re maybe willing to now sacrifice our environmental quality,” Davis said, noting the United States has long “pointed a finger at China” for its emissions.

The study’s authors say environmental pollution caused by manufacturing, and by worldwide trade, requires a global response that balances the need for clean air and economic growth.
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A U.S. astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts made a parachute landing in Kazakhstan on Monday, wrapping up a nearly six-month mission aboard the International Space Station, a NASA TV broadcast showed.

The Russian Soyuz capsule, which left the station shortly before 4 a.m. EDT (0800 GMT), touched down southeast of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, at 7:20 a.m. EDT (1120 GMT).

Seated in the capsule were returning station commander Shane Kimbrough of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Andrey Borisenko from Russian space agency Roscosmos.

“It’s really neat to be part of something this big, something bigger than ourselves … even bigger than a nation,” Kimbrough said during a change-of-command ceremony on Sunday.

“We get the ability up here to interact with things that actually benefit all of humanity. It’s really humbling.”

Three crew members remain aboard the station, a $100 billion research laboratory that flies about 250 miles (400 km) above Earth. In command is NASA’s Peggy Whitson, who on April 24 will break the 534-day record for the most time spent in space by a U.S. astronaut.

Whitson, a veteran of two previous missions on the station, is the first woman to hold the post of commander twice.

Whitson, Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy and France’s Thomas Pesque will be joined by two new crew members on April 20.

The U.S. and Russian space agencies agreed last week to extend Whitson’s mission by three months.

Russia is reducing its station cadre to two from three members until its new science laboratory launches to the space station next year, the head of Roscosmos said last week at the U.S. Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Whitson will return to Earth in September, having amassed a career U.S. record of 666 days in orbit. Russian cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, who has 878 days in orbit, is the world’s most experienced space flier.
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Researchers are reporting a link between a climate phenomenon know as El Nino and the number of cholera cases in eastern Africa. Predicting when there’s going to be an El Nino event could improve public health preparedness.

El Ninos are a global climate phenomenon that occurs at irregular times, approximately every two to seven years.

During an El Nino, surface ocean temperatures in the eastern Pacific off the coast of South America become warmer than usual. The warming trend begins around Christmas time.

The following year, in the fall, sea surface temperatures also warm, if somewhat less, in the western Pacific, leading to extreme weather events like flooding and droughts, conditions that are ripe for cholera outbreaks.

Approximately 177 million people reside in areas where the incidence of cholera increases during El Nino.

But there’s been scant evidence of El Nino’s health impact in Africa.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found the incidence of cholera increased in countries in East Africa.

“Because they can either lead to surface flooding that washes contamination into drinking water in areas where there’s open defecation,” said epidemiologist Sean Moore, who led the study. “It also can lead to overflowing of sewer systems in urban areas which again can lead to contamination of drinking water.”

There are approximately 150,000 cases of cholera per year, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, according to Moore, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health in Baltimore.

But during El Ninos, researchers found the incidence swelled by some 50,000 cholera cases in eastern Africa, although the overall number of cases on the continent did not change — for reasons that are not completely understood, said Moore.

Patterns of shift in the number of cholera cases were measured during El Ninos between the years 2000 and 2014. There also were 30,000 fewer cases reported in southern Africa during El Nino years compared to non-El Nino years, researchers found..

Scientists also saw a slight increase in the number of cholera cases in areas hit by drought due to El Nino.

Moore said that’s because when water becomes scarce, available drinking water can become contaminated by bacteria in human waste.

Without treatment, mortality rates from cholera can climb as high as 50 percent.

To the extent that the climate phenomenon can be predicted six to 12 months ahead of time, Moore said public health officials can prepare for outbreaks, which tend to occur early on.

“An advance warning could, even if it doesn’t prevent outbreak, it could at least prevent the deaths that tend to occur during the early part of an outbreak,” he said.

With oral rehydration therapy, Moore said the risk of death from cholera drops to 1 percent. He said there are now cheap cholera vaccines that could be used to prevent the disease when it’s known that an area is going to be hit by an El Nino.
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Nearly five million children under age five have been successfully vaccinated against polio in war-torn Yemen almost two-months after a nationwide immunization campaign was launched by the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and the World Bank.

The campaign, which began on February 20, has taken much longer than usual to complete because of security challenges.  The logistics involved in reaching millions of children with life-saving vaccines in war-torn Yemen are immense and complicated.

WHO spokesman, Tarik Jasarevic, told VOA different parts of the country are controlled by different warring parties.  He said informing them of the campaign, organizing health teams and transporting the polio vaccines takes a lot of time.

“For this campaign, more than 5,000 vehicles have been rented, more than 40,000 health workers were mobilized…. This is a big operation, obviously.  But, with the support of local religious leaders, political leaders, that element is absolutely crucial that it is being accepted by the population and that vaccination teams are being trained and prepared in advance,” he said.

Jasarevic said health workers only recently were able to bring the campaign to Yemen’s Sa’ada governorate.  Despite intensifying violence, he said more than 150,000 children under age five were vaccinated against polio and nearly 370,000 children between the ages of six months and 15 years were immunized against measles there.

He said the war has made routine immunizations in Yemen impossible, making nationwide immunization campaigns against polio and other killer diseases necessary.

“We have seen for example in Syria that polio came back because there were areas where children were not immunized for some time.  We do not want this to happen in Yemen.  Yemen is still polio-free and we want to keep it polio-free and these campaigns are one of the ways to make sure that the virus cannot find a host,” Jasarevic said.  

The United Nations reports Yemen’s two-year-long conflict has all but destroyed the country’s health system.  It says the situation of Yemen’s children continues to worsen and many are dying from preventable diseases.
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Getting a vaccine without the shot has always been one of the greatest hopes of medicine. For people in the developed world it means getting a vaccine can be as simple as taking an aspirin. For people in the developing world, or in isolated rural areas, it means they can get vaccines without a doctor or nurse. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Malaysian customs officials said Monday they have confiscated 18 rhino horns, weighing more than 51 kilograms, and valued at over $3 million.

Customs said they found the horns in a crate Friday at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport cargo terminal after receiving an anonymous tip.

The haul had been shipped from Mozambique via a Qatar Airways flight with false documentation, classifying the the horns as “obre de arte” — or work of art.  

Rhino horn global trade is banned under a United Nations convention.  

Malaysian officials say the case is under investigation and no suspects have been arrested.

Rhino horns have been used for centuries in traditional Asian medicine, but they have not been proven to cure any illnesses.  

The wild rhino population at the start of the 20th century was 500,000, but has since dwindled to 29,000.  
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A cyclone that left a trail of destruction in northeast Australia and New Zealand has also damaged one of the few healthy sections of the Great Barrier Reef to have escaped large-scale bleaching, scientists said on Monday.

The natural devastation adds to the human and economic toll of Cyclone Debbie, which killed at least six people in recent weeks and severed rail transport lines in one of the world’s biggest coal precincts.

The damage caused when the intense, slow-moving cyclone system struck a healthier section of the reef outweighed any potential beneficial cooling effect, scientists from the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies said.

“Any cooling effects related to the cyclone are likely to be negligible in relation to the damage it caused, which unfortunately struck a section of the reef that had largely escaped the worst of the bleaching,” ARC said in a statement.

The World Heritage site has suffered a second bleaching event in 12 months, triggered by unseasonably warm waters, ARC added. Higher temperatures force coral to expel living algae and turn white as it calcifies.

Mildly bleached coral can recover if the temperature drops, and an ARC survey found this happened in southern parts of the reef, where coral mortality was much lower, though scientists said much of the Great Barrier Reef was unlikely to recover.

“It takes at least a decade for a full recovery of even the fastest-growing corals, so mass bleaching events 12 months apart offers zero prospect of recovery for reefs damaged in 2016,” said James Kerry, a senior research officer at the ARC.

Repeated damage could prompt UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee to reconsider a 2015 decision not to put the Great Barrier Reef on its “in danger” list.

Tourists drawn to the unique attraction spend A$5.2 billion ($3.9 billion) each year, a 2013 Deloitte Access Economics report estimated.
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More and more Americans are interested in consuming healthy food and products. Retailers are feeding this growing demand by offering new products or introducing old ones in brand new ways. Coconut is currently one of the hottest trends in the U.S. food market. VOA’s Faiza Elmasry has more. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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Most people have likely heard about the dangers of microplastics, the particles less than 5 millimeters in size that deteriorate from larger plastic pieces that have entered the oceans. Scientists are beginning to realize the effect this plastic is having on all kinds of sea life, from the smallest to the largest, and even those that live in the deepest darkest parts of the Mariana Trench. VOA’s Kevin Enochs has details.
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A relatively large asteroid will cross Earth’s orbit around the sun this month. Astrophysicists and astronomers say there is no chance of a collision, but it will be the closest flyby of an asteroid that large for at least another 10 years.

Asteroid 2014 JO25, discovered three years ago, is about 650 meters (2,100 feet) in diameter, 60 times as large as the small asteroid that plunged into our atmosphere as a meteor and exploded over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk in 2013. That blast was felt thousands of kilometers away and caused havoc on the ground, damaging more than 7,000 homes and offices and injuring 1,500 people.

Asteroid 2014 JO25’s pass by Earth on April 19 will be a near miss, cosmically speaking. The U.S. space agency NASA said no one should worry: “There is no possibility for the asteroid to collide with our planet, [but] this will be a very close approach for an asteroid of this size.”

The Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union classifies 2014 JO25 as a “potentially hazardous asteroid.” (Astronomers classify asteroids as “minor planets”; when they pass close to Earth they are termed “near Earth objects.”)

WATCH: NASA Animation: Asteroid 2014 JO25’s Orbit

An animation of the intersection of Earth’s orbit and that of 2014 JO25, prepared by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a unit of the California Institute of Technology, makes it look like an awfully close call, but the hard facts are more reassuring: At its closest point, the asteroid will be about five times as far from Earth as the moon is, more than 1.75 million kilometers away (1,087,400 miles).

Although the asteroid is expected to be twice as reflective as our moon, it will be difficult to spot in a night sky filled with stars, and certainly not without help. Scientists say the sort of telescope amateur astronomers use should be adequate to pick out the space rock as it whizzes across the sky at 120,000 kilometers per hour (74,500 mph).

EarthSky.org, a website that follows developments in the cosmos and throughout nature in general, has posted an article with detailed information to help sky-watchers find the asteroid on April 19, and for a day or two afterward.

Professional astronomers also will be tracking 2014 JO25 closely. Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory, an extremely powerful radio telescope center, will study the asteroid for five days.

After all, it’s not often that something as big as this comes along, even a couple of million kilometers from home. NASA says 2014 JO25 hasn’t been this close to Earth in the past 400 years, and it will be at least 500 years before it comes back for a repeat close encounter with our planet.

Asteroids actually pass close to Earth fairly often, but it’s their size that matters. Asteroid 2017 GM made one of the closest passes by Earth ever seen — 16,000 kilometers (9,900 miles) above sea level — less than a week ago, on April 4. Little notice was taken, however, because that chunk of space rock was about the size of a small car.
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When Arnaud Laillou, a nutrition specialist with UNICEF, led a salt iodization study in 2014, he wanted to be sure that salt producers were not adding too much iodine.

Just four years earlier, UNICEF had stopped providing iodine to salt producers at the end of a decade-long, largely successful government-run iodization program.

Laillou was stunned to find that 90 percent of coarse salt and 40-50 percent of fine salt was now not iodized. And all of it was labeled as iodized.

“It was a real shock for us,” says Laillou of the findings of the paper that was published last year in the online journal Nutrients.

Serious public health problem

That paper said iodine deficiency in Cambodia had become “a serious public health problem” just years after the issue had largely been dealt with, and warned that poorer families and rural families were worst affected.

That was at odds with a study carried out three years earlier that showed salt producers were adding iodine, and that authorities were enforcing a 2003 subdecree that mandated iodization.

Iodine is essential to brain development and hormonal functions. If a pregnant woman is iodine-deficient, for example, her baby’s brain will not develop properly. The mineral is vital for brain development in children, too, and for proper hormone functioning in all ages. Iodine is so important that the World Health Organization has described iodine-deficiency as “the [world’s] single greatest preventable cause of mental retardation.”

Iodizing salt is widely regarded as one of the cheapest and most effective public health measures: it costs 2 cents per kilogram of salt.

Children hurt most

Iodine-deficiency, Laillou said, is particularly damaging for children.

“For example, Cambodia is investing a lot of money at the level of the Ministry of Education to improve the education of their children,” he said. “But having a lack of iodine in the brain, it decreases [their] IQ by 13 points.”

That, he points out, compares with the loss of three IQ points for a child who is not breastfed for the first six months of life.

Wholesale failure

In theory, adding iodine to Cambodia’s annual output of 80-100,000 tons of salt should be simple: close to 100 percent is produced by the SPCKK cooperative in the southern province of Kampot. SPCKK produces coarse salt, which it sells in bulk to middlemen who operate boilers that refine that into fine salt.

By law, SPCKK must iodize all of its salt output. But over the years several of the iodizing machines it was given have broken down, and SPCKK has not sourced spare parts. Now it has four working machines and that’s not enough.

And so, as SPCKK’s technical chief, Bun Narin told VOA, its workers often spray iodine by hand, a method that is at best imprecise.

“Large companies [outside Cambodia] use machines to monitor, whereas we are still using labor and so it’s not always accurate,” he said.

That is putting it mildly, given that Laillou’s research found 90 percent of the country’s coarse salt lacks any iodine. Despite that, SPCKK’s output is labeled as containing the mandated amount of iodine.

If boilers don’t test for the concentration of iodine in the coarse salt that they buy, and if, further along the production line, salt repackagers, like 57-year-old Koy Rithiya, don’t test for the concentration in the fine salt that they buy from the boilers and then add iodine where needed, the result is noniodized salt.

Which is exactly what has happened.

Routine testing

When Rithiya set up his business in Phnom Penh 15 years ago, he didn’t know he needed to add iodine; he started doing that a decade ago after being advised by UNICEF.

These days he uses an electronic monitor to test the concentration of iodine in the 500 kilograms of fine salt that he repackages each day, and adds iodine where needed to meet the mandated standard of 30-60 parts per million.

He doesn’t yet use the monitor to test his daily output of 400 kilograms of coarse salt; instead he relies on a test that merely shows whether iodine is present or not. That test, however, does not measure the concentration.

Rithiya reckons the problem of iodine-deficiency has emerged in part because some producers use expired iodine, “but also because some producers combine salt with iodine without correctly balancing it.”

“And some don’t bother to use it correctly,” he said.

A lack of enforcement

The report makes clear where the problem lies: on the production side is SPCKK, as well as some boilers and salt repackagers; on the enforcement side are the authorities for failing to ensure that producers follow the law.

The irony is that by 2010, the government’s program meant the health problems associated with iodine deficiency in Cambodia were largely a thing of the past. A decade earlier, nearly 1 in 5 primary school children had goiters, a condition where the thyroid in the neck swells up. Many adults did, too. By 2010, that was no longer the case.

But when iodine prices tripled after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan, many salt producers in Cambodia stopped buying the additive, and the authorities failed to make sure they were iodizing. The result: a re-emergent public health issue that has, to date, remained largely invisible.

The situation, though bad, should start to improve. UNICEF is working with a government subcommittee to devise a certification standard for all producers, although that could take two years to implement.

Ven Keahak, who heads the subcommittee on salt iodization, says the new licensing system will mean producers “have to have a machine, iodine powder [in stock], a brand name, and salt with proper quality in order to get a license.”

“It’s a legal enforcement that the ministry has to conduct,” he said.

A lack of enforcement has been part of the problem, but Keahak would not comment on the failure of government agencies to apply the current law. He did confirm that no one has been prosecuted for failing to add iodine or for failing to monitor the system.

The difficulty for concerned Cambodians is that every bag of salt carries the logo stating that it is iodized. To deal with that, the Ministry of Planning will now test all salt brands and will place advertisements in newspapers to tell people which brands they can trust.

Until then, the failure to police the country’s salt output will keep damaging lives in what experts say was an entirely avoidable public health issue.
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With the right attachment, a smartphone can be used as a diagnostic tool for infectious diseases like tuberculosis. Faith Lapidus reports.
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The World Health Organization Friday marked World Health Day with the warning that depression is the most common cause of ill health, affecting some 300 million people worldwide. The U.N. agency is urging people to seek treatment for depression, which can lead to disability and even death.

WHO says conflict, wars and natural disasters are major risk factors for depression.  

WHO estimates one in five people affected by these events suffers from depression or anxiety. Given the magnitude of the problem, it says mental health and psychosocial assistance should be a part of all humanitarian assistance.  

Apart from these situations, WHO reports depression is the leading cause of disability. The director of WHO’s department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Shekhar Saxena, says depression is behind a global epidemic of death by suicide.

“All over the world, 800,000 people die because of suicide every year and this converts into a death every 40 seconds,” said Saxena. “So, while we are dealing with the number of deaths, which are of course very unfortunate in conflicts and wars, we also need to remember that there are silent epidemics going on in the world, which are also killing a very large number of people without obvious headlines and banners.”  

Saxena tells VOA there is no significant difference in the prevalence of depression between developed and developing countries. He notes the majority of people with depression lives in low- and middle-income countries.

“Depression is more common amongst the women – 5.1 percent versus 3.6 percent amongst men,” said Saxena. “Other risk factors include poverty, discrimination, and all adverse life situations – either chronic or acute, especially amongst young people.”  

Saxena says treatment usually involves psychotherapy, antidepressant medication or a combination of both. He says it is not necessary to have a specialist treat depression. He says the so-called talking cure administered by general doctors, nurses, or health care workers can be just as effective.
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We have radars to track flying objects, but a tiny fly may be even better at tracking and grabbing fast moving prey. Scientists at the University of Cambridge learned that not only the number of lenses in the fly’s eye, but also their variety, help it focus on fast moving objects. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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