YCLOAK

Curious toddlers find the drugs in a mother’s purse or accidentally dropped on the floor. Sometimes a parent fails to secure the child-resistant cap on a bottle of painkillers.

 

No matter how it happens, if a 35-pound toddler grabs just one opioid pill, chews it and releases the full concentration of a time-released adult drug into their small bodies, death can come swiftly.

 

These are some of the youngest victims of the nation’s opioid epidemic — children under age 5 who die after swallowing opioids. The number of children’s deaths is still small relative to the overall toll from opioids, but toddler fatalities have climbed steadily over the last 10 years.

 

In 2000, 14 children in the U.S. under age 5 died after ingesting opioids. By 2015, that number climbed to 51, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, alone, four children died last year of accidental overdoses. Another 2-year-old perished in January.

 

Each family who loses a toddler to opioids confronts a death that probably could have been prevented. Here are a few of their stories:

 

An energetic birthday girl, a methadone mystery

 

Cataleya Tamekia-Damiah Wimberly couldn’t sit still. She spent most of her first birthday party in Milwaukee dancing and diving into the cake. But her first birthday party was also her last. Nearly three weeks later, she was found dead of a cause her mother never suspected — a methadone overdose.

 

Helen Jackson, 24, was styling her older daughter’s hair when she got a call from Cataleya’s father, who shared custody of the little girl. He sobbed on the phone as he explained how he found their daughter unresponsive the morning of Feb. 16, 2016.

 

“I screamed so hard and so loud,” Jackson said. “The screams that came out of me took all my strength, all my wind. It was just terrible.”

 

Police were puzzled. They looked into whether the toddler was smothered while co-sleeping with her father and his girlfriend. They also investigated carbon monoxide poisoning because of a gas smell. Toxicology tests eventually revealed the methadone in her system.

 

Jackson said her daughter, while in the care of her father, was at a relative’s house when she swallowed the methadone that took her life.

 

Police are still investigating how Cataleya got the methadone. The case could be referred to the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office for consideration of criminal charges, said Sgt. Timothy Gauerke.

 

Since Cataleya’s death, friends and family have commented on what they perceive as Jackson’s strength in dealing with her loss. In reality, she said, she feels fragile and weak.

 

“I don’t know when I’m going to fall apart,” she said. “I don’t know when I’m going to explode. It’s all still in there.”

Mother’s prescription proves fatal for daughter

 

At just 2 years old, Londyn Raine Robinson Sack was protective of her baby brother, Liam.

 

“She thought she was his mother,” said Londyn’s grandmother, Shauna Etheredge. “She liked to be the boss of her little brother.”

 

Londyn’s own mother was convicted of second-degree manslaughter and risk of injury to a child in connection with the Oct. 19, 2014, death of her daughter, who ingested an opioid known as Suboxone that was packaged in the form of a dissolving strip.

 

Prosecutors in New Britain, Connecticut, said the drug was obtained illegally by her mother and was dispensed in a box, not a child-resistant container.

 

Rebekah Robinson entered a plea in which she did not accept or deny responsibility for the charges but agreed to accept punishment. In June 2016, she was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 10 years of probation.

 

Robinson apparently knew Londyn had ingested the opioid but did not call for medical help, according to prosecutors. It was an older sibling who called 911 to say her little sister was not breathing.

 

The Connecticut Department of Children and Families was cited in a 2015 report for failing to adequately identify risks to Londyn and Robinson’s three other children, given her history of mental health, substance abuse and child-welfare complaints.

 

Besides her protective nature, Londyn loved making people laugh, Etheredge said.

 

“She would put underwear on her head and act goofy and silly,” her grandmother said. “She loved to explore.”

 

Etheredge, of Indian Trail, North Carolina, said one of her lasting memories of her grandchild was a visit to the local park.

 

“The last time I saw her, she was running around and trying to catch up with the birds,” she said.

Precocious “lil’ Reg” dies, uncle stands accused

Curious and energetic, Reginald Kendall Harris Jr. would hold conversations beyond those of a typical toddler.

 

“If he was talking to his mom, you would think he was five or six years old,” said his great-uncle Calvin Harris, of Portland, Oregon. “If you would talk to him, you would engage in a full conversation. It was hilarious for his age,” Harris said.

 

The boy died on Oct. 10, 2016, after swallowing methadone. Portland police soon issued a warning, saying the case was a reminder to keep all prescription drugs away from children.

 

Reginald’s uncle, Willie Lee Harris Jr., is behind bars, accused of leaving methadone in a place accessible to his nephew. He has pleaded not guilty to second-degree manslaughter.

 

Harris’ mother, Pamela Harris, of Vancouver, Washington, said her grandson got hold of the drug while riding in her son’s car.

 

“Lil’ Reg was so touchy and curious,” she recalled. The methadone was in a cup.

 

The boy whose family affectionately called him “Lil’ Reg” would “say some crazy stuff sometimes, somethings you wouldn’t expect a 2-year-old to say,” great-grandmother Lucy Lee Harris recalled. “He would answer the door: ‘What up, dawg?'”

 

Instead of the way he died, Pamela Harris chooses to remember how her grandson lived, such as his joy when the family made plans to visit his favorite hangout, a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant with a kid-friendly menu and games.

 

Harris said his death was almost too much to bear after losing her home in Hurricane Katrina and receiving a breast cancer diagnosis.

 

“Now I’ve got a grandson that’s not here and a son that’s being charged,” Harris said. “I couldn’t breathe. It was like I was being smothered.”

 
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A photo published on social media reveals Elon Musk’s SpaceX Corporation is close to fielding a rocket robot.

According to Florida Today newspaper, Stephen Marr got a good view of the bot sitting on top of a SpaceX drone ship at Port Canaveral, Florida.

“I knew there was something different there,” Marr, 34, told the paper.

Marr posted the photo on Reddit where it was widely agreed to be a robot, and users on the site nicknamed it “Optimus Prime,” after a character from the movie Transformers.

The robot is expected to work on the drone ships, securing the first stage of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets, which will land on the drone ships, Florida Today reports. The robot is expected to save the company money and increase safety.

Ricky Lim, of SpaceX, told Florida Today that the robot is in a “testing phase” as a “future capability.”

“I don’t think it’s very far away” from being used, Lim told the paper. “But it’s new.”

He added that the robot has not been officially named.

SpaceX has recovered eight first stages of Falcon 9 rockets, starting in 2015. Three of those stages landed on pads at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, and five times on drone ships at sea.

SpaceX is expecting to launch another rocket from Kennedy Space Center in coming months. That mission is expected to be the first use of a used or “flight tested” Falcon 9 rocket.
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Amputees with prosthetic limbs may soon have much a better sense of touch, temperature and texture, thanks to the energy-saving power of the sun, British researchers said on Thursday.

While prosthetics are usually fully powered using batteries, a new prototype from University of Glasgow researchers opens up the possibility for so-called “solar-powered skin,” which would include better sense capabilities than current technology.

“If an entity is going out in a sunny day, then they won’t need any battery” to activate their senses, said Ravinder Dahiya, a research fellow at the university and a leader of the study. “They can feel, without worrying about battery.”

The technology involves installing a thin layer of pure carbon around a prosthetic arm, hand or leg. This allows light to pass through it and be easily used as solar energy, the researchers said in a research paper.

The sun can provide up to 15 times more energy than is usually needed to power a prosthetic limb, Dahiya said.

This extra — and renewable — energy can be used to power sensors that increase sense and feeling in a limb, so much so that the prosthetic can feel pressure, temperature and texture like natural skin, the paper said.

“The skin is sensitive to touch and pressure, so when you touch the skin there you will know what point you are contacting and how much force you are applying,” Dahiya said, describing the prototype.

The scientists are the first to develop a model for solar-powered prosthetic skin, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The technology could also increase the functionality of robots, allowing them to have a better understanding of what they touch and interact with, according to Dahiya.

If robots had limbs that are sensitive to touch and pressure they would be less likely to make errors or injure humans, he said.

The researchers hope to further develop the prototype in the next two years, Dahiya said. Eventually, he hopes to power the limb’s motors with the renewable energy as well – rather than just the skin.

“Because we are saving a lot of energy, our vision is that … if we store this energy in some way we will be able to also power the motors with the energy,” he said.

“The prosthetic will be fully energy autonomous.”
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Tyrannosaurus rex and his buddies could be on the move as a new study proposes a massive shake-up of the dinosaur family tree.

Scientists who took a deeper look at dinosaur fossils suggest a different evolutionary history for dinosaurs, moving theropods such as T. rex to a new branch of the family tree and hinting at an earlier and more northern origin for dinosaurs.

The revised dinosaur tree makes more sense than the old one, initially designed more than a century ago based on hip shape, said Matt Baron, a paleontology doctoral student at the University of Cambridge in England. He is the lead author of the study in Wednesday’s journal Nature.

“If the authors are correct, this really turns our longstanding understanding of dinosaur evolution upside down!” Kristi Curry Rogers, a paleontologist at Macalaster College in Minnesota who wasn’t part of the study, wrote in an email.

Dinosaurs are split into two groups. One group has bird-like hips and is called Ornithischia. It includes the stegosaurus. The group with reptile-like hips is called Saurischia, and includes the brontosaurus.

Theropods, which include T. rex and the type of dinosaurs that later evolved into modern-day birds, were considered an offshoot from the group that includes the brontosaurus. The new study moves them to the group that includes the stegosaurus, but on a different branch.

“It means that animals that we’ve always thought were very closely related to each other might not be,” said Rogers, who praised the study, saying it prompts a whole bunch of new questions.

Baron and colleagues looked at 450 characteristics of 75 dinosaur species. They used computer simulations to try to group together those with similar characteristics, creating tens of thousands of potential dinosaur family trees. The proposed one combines the 80 most likely scenarios, he said.

It may sound like an academic exercise, but it’s important to understand how big animals changed with time, Baron said, noting that the dinosaurs ruled Earth for more than 150 million years.

His research suggests that dinosaurs popped up 247 million years ago — 10 million years earlier than the standard theory says — with a dinosaur from Tanzania in East Africa. It’s called Nyasasaurus, was 6 to 10 feet tall and a plant-eater.

He also found an animal that’s not quite a dinosaur, but as close as you can get, that is a reptilian ancestor. And it was in Scotland. Previous theories pointed to dinosaurs first evolving out of the Southern Hemisphere, and many outside scientists said there wasn’t enough evidence to support Baron’s northern concept.

The paper is already dividing dinosaur experts. Famed dinosaur expert Paul Sereno at the University of Chicago called the basis of the Baron family tree “weak” and said “the central question the paper leaves unanswered for me is ‘Why?'”

Matthew Carrano, dinosaur curator at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, said it’s hard to side with any theory because early dinosaur fossil records are so incomplete.
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A discovery involving a rare California frog has researchers hopping for joy.

Nine egg masses from the California red-legged frog were discovered on March 14 in a creek in the Santa Monica Mountains, which stretch from Los Angeles westward along the Malibu coast into Ventura County.

The endangered species hasn’t been seen naturally in the mountains since the 1970s and the National Park Service has been trying to rebuild the population by transplanting eggs from a population in the nearby Simi Hills.

The discovery of new egg masses suggests that after four years of effort, the population is showing signs of sustaining itself without human help, although transplants will continue, the park service indicated.

“I was literally crying when the stream team showed me the photos of egg masses,” Katy Delaney, a National Park Service ecologist with Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, said in a statement. “The years of work we’ve put in is showing amazing progress. There’s still plenty of work to be done, but this is a major moment for the project.”

Red-legged frogs famously appear in the Mark Twain story, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.

At 2 to 5 inches long, they are the largest native frogs in the West and once were found throughout the state. However, habitat loss, pollution and the rise of nonnative species such as crayfish and predatory bullfrogs have vastly shrunk the population.

Efforts are under way to restore the species in other areas. Last year, thousands of tadpoles were released in Yosemite National Park, where the natural population vanished more than 40 years ago.

Thousands more tadpoles and adult frogs are being bred at the San Francisco Zoo & Gardens for release in the park.
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Feel down about getting older? Wish your life was better? Worried about all the problems that come with age?

A new survey suggests you need only wait: Many pessimistic feelings held by people earlier in life take an optimistic turn as they move toward old age. Even hallmark concerns of old age — about declining health, lack of independence and memory loss — lessen as Americans age.

“The younger generation is less optimistic,” said Dr. Zia Agha, chief medical officer at West Health, a nonprofit focused on aging issues whose related research institute released the poll Wednesday with the independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago. “Perhaps as they age they will build resilience and they build the capacity that will help them cope better.”

Generally speaking, optimism about growing older increased steadily with age, the poll found. Among people in their 30s, 46 percent described themselves as mostly or somewhat optimistic about aging, compared with 66 percent of people 70 and older. Likewise, respondents showed a decade-by-decade increase in feeling confident, not helpless, about aging, and in assessing their household finances positively.

When asked to rate their quality of life, people noted an improvement as they moved from their 50s to their 60s and beyond. Among respondents 70 and older, two-thirds rated their life excellent or very good, compared with about half of 30-somethings.

Least likely to fret about health

Among some metrics, pessimism appears to grow as people move out of their 30s into middle age before falling late in life. Those 70 and older were least likely to express worry about age bringing poor health, a move into a nursing home or memory loss. They also were least likely to fear old age could prompt them to be disrespected or become a burden on their families. People in their 60s and beyond had the lowest fear of losing their independence.

Other research has pointed to greater satisfaction, happiness and optimism among older people.

Agha said the latest survey reflected the idea that people often find in their later years a growing appreciation for facets of life they may have focused on less when they were younger, including spirituality and personal relationships. Fulfillment from those things can help bolster overall happiness, even in the face of potential physical decline.

The NORC-West Health poll also found those 70 and older were also less likely than younger people to feel that seniors are forgotten in America today or that they receive too little respect. Not surprisingly, older people were less likely to see the age of 65 as a marker of old age. About four in 10 people in their 30s regarded that number as symbolic of reaching old age, twice as large a share as those in their 70s or beyond.

The poll was based on online and telephone interviews of 3,026 adults age 30 and older who were members of NORC’s nationally representative AmeriSpeak panel. It was conducted September 19 through October 21 and had a margin of sampling error for all respondents of plus or minus 2.2 percentage points.
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Scientists have developed a quick test —using a smartphone app — that a man can use in the privacy of his home to determine whether he is fertile. The sperm test could help millions of couples around the world that have tried unsuccessfully to conceive a child.

The new rapid, automated test can show within a matter of seconds whether the man’s sperm count is too low to conceive or if there are problems with motility of the sperm so the reproductive cells have trouble fertilizing a female egg.

The fertility test is an inexpensive smartphone attachment that the scientists said is made of materials which cost around $4.50. It was developed by researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in the U.S. state of Utah and at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

 

 

 

 

95 percent accurate

John Petrozza is director of Massachusetts General’s fertility center, which used the sperm app to analyze 350 samples. The experimental test proved to be greater than 95 percent accurate in detecting problems with a man’s sperm.

Petrozza said many women wonder why they have trouble getting pregnant after months or years of trying to conceive with their partner.

“Now we have something that can screen their partner and do it reliably.  And if there’s something there, they’ll get them in to see the fertility doctor or gynecologists much sooner and I think that’s always a good thing,” he said.

The test is designed to be used at home, rather than at a clinic, in a growing field of what is known as point of care medicine.

After placing a semen sample on a slide, the user inserts it into the attachment placed on the phone, using the device’s optics to analyze the semen. The smartphone’s powerful camera is able to take both still and moving pictures of the sperm sample.

Volunteers confirm simplicity  

The app guides users through a series of simple steps for analyzing the semen. Total sperm count is measured by a miniaturized weight scale that transmits the information wirelessly to the phone.  

Researchers gave the device to 10 untrained volunteers from the Boston clinic to confirm that it is simple to use.  In that test, researchers say it correctly classified 100 semen samples for fertility.  

The male fertility analyzer was described in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Others uses for app

Petrozza says the smartphone attachment could also be used as a follow-up test for men who’ve had vasectomies,  voluntary operations to surgically interrupt a man’s sperm flow for birth control.  

At the same time, Petrozza envisions using the device to test for venereal diseases such as gonorrhea.  And scientists are now trying to perfect the point-of-care device to test for Zika virus in sperm, which has been shown to be a reservoir for the pathogen.

An analysis of the semen’s quality and concentration, said Petrozza, is based on parameters for fertility established by the World Health Organization.

He said the American Society for Reproductive Medicine has been in contact with the world body.

“And I know that recently they’ve worked with the World Health Organization in trying to look at global infertility and trying to see how can we can bring treatment, how can we bring diagnostic tests to resource-limited countries.  And this could be a potential way to do semen analysis in a very cost-effective way,” said Petrozza.

Millions of couples struggle with fertility

An estimated 45 million couples around the world struggle with fertility.  Forty percent of the time, say experts, infertility is due to abnormal sperm.

Petrozza and colleagues are aiming to get the male sperm analyzer on the market in the next 18 to 24 months, to be sold alongside pregnancy tests.

He says they’re hoping to keep the cost of the device to anywhere from $30 to $45.
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One in four children — 600 million in total — may live in areas with severely limited water resources by 2040, putting them at risk of deadly diseases like cholera and diarrhea, the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF said on Wednesday.

Already some 500 million children live in areas with limited water supplies, and the demand for water today far exceeds available resources in 36 countries, UNICEF said.

Supplies are expected to shrink further due to droughts, rising temperatures, flooding, population growth and urbanization, the U.N. agency said in a report.

If no action is taken to clean up and conserve water supplies, more children will be forced to drink potentially unsafe water as a result, UNICEF said.

Climate change plays a part

“Around the world, millions of children lack access to safe water — endangering their lives, undermining their health, and jeopardizing their futures,” said UNICEF executive director Anthony Lake.

“This crisis will only grow unless we take collective action now” he added in a statement.

Climate change is one of the reasons behind reduced water sources in the future, impacting “the quality and quantity of the water,” Cecilia Scharp, a senior water advisor at UNICEF, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Flooding, which is expected to increase due to rising sea levels and changing weather patterns, can pollute water supplies and spread unsafe water across wide areas. Droughts are also expected to increase in frequency and severity.

More work for women, girls

Women and girls now spend 200 million hours a day collecting water, and this will rise if they are forced to travel further to reach water sources, making them vulnerable to attack in some countries, UNICEF said.

UNICEF’s projections are based on models assuming no action is taken to conserve water and tackle pollution, Scharp said. But governments, industries, agricultural businesses and communities can help diminish the impact of climate change on children in countries pressed for water resources, the agency said.

Governments should plan for risks to water supplies from drought, rising temperatures, flooding, population growth and urbanization, Scharp said.

Reusing waste water

Businesses should ensure they are conserving as much water as possible, and reusing waste water whenever they can, UNICEF said.

“You can use economic incentives so people don’t overuse [water],” Scharp said of local governments. “You can put restrictions on … personal use of water in urban areas where a lot of water is used for lifestyle activities, more than [for] consumption.”

Poorer children will be hurt the most by a depletion of water sources in the future. This “should come as no surprise,” UNICEF said.
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Led by cutbacks in China and India, construction of new coal-fired power plants is falling worldwide, improving chances climate goals can be met despite earlier pessimism, three environmental groups said Wednesday.

A joint report by the groups CoalSwarm, the Sierra Club and Greenpeace follows a warning this week by two international agencies that the world needs to shift quickly away from fossil fuels to curb global warming. Environmentalists were dismayed by President Donald Trump’s U.S. government budget proposal last week that would cut spending on renewable energy.

Construction starts for coal-fired plants in China and India were down by 62 percent in January from a year earlier while new facilities starting operation declined 29 percent, according to the report. It said older plants in the United States and Europe are being retired at a record pace.

‘Global climate goals’

The latest developments “appear to have brought global climate goals within feasible reach, raising the prospect that the worst levels of climate change might be avoided,” said the report.

It acknowledged “the margin for error is tight” and said sustained progress will require China and India to scrap more than 100 coal plants on which construction has been suspended. And it warned that countries, including South Korea and Indonesia, are failing to develop renewables, which could increase their need for coal power.

In a separate report, the U.S.-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis said falling power demand in Japan means most of the 45 new coal plants the country has planned will likely never be built.

The reports mark a shift in sentiment from six months ago, when environmentalists warned governments were doing too little to carry out the Paris climate accord. Signed by 170 countries, it calls for holding global temperature increases to no more than 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) in hopes of preventing sea level rise and other drastic change.

Biggest greenhouse gas emitter

China, the biggest greenhouse gas emitter, said at that time its coal use would rise until 2030. But later data showed the peak passed in 2013 and consumption is falling.

Countries including China, Germany, India and Japan are moving away from coal as alternatives get cheaper, said Tim Buckley, the IEEFA’s director of energy finance studies.

“I don’t think Trump can stop that,” he said.

Despite such changes, the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose to a new high last year and is increasing, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Asia alone is expected to account for 70 to 80 percent of the global growth in coal-fired power capacity over the next two decades.

Industry experts cautioned that countries including India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Vietnam need to keep adding coal power because it is the only affordable option in a region where 500 million people lack access to electricity. The cost of solar and wind have fallen by up to 80 percent in some markets, but in places such as Bangladesh or parts of China it can still be double that of coal.

“We have to meet the basic needs of people while pushing for energy transition at the same time,” said Yongping Zhai, an adviser on energy to the Asian Development Bank. “You will need a mixture of different fuels. Coal will be there. You cannot avoid it.”

Canceled half its plans

China canceled half its planned additional coal-fired generating capacity over the past year but will still add 100 gigawatts by 2020, according to Xizhou Zhou, who heads the Asian gas and power practice for IHS Markit, a research firm. He said Asian countries are due to add 180 gigawatts out of a global total of 210 gigawatts.

“It’s true that we are seeing a slowdown in coal plant additions, but that doesn’t mean that demand will stop increasing or that they won’t need to build coal plants,” Zhou said.

In China, construction of power plants totaling more than 300 gigawatts was suspended following last year’s release of the latest five-year economic development plan, according to the CoalSwarm report.

On Saturday, Beijing’s last major coal-fired power plant was shut down under plans to switch the Chinese capital to gas and other power sources.

China’s power demand is cooling due to official efforts to reduce reliance on heavy industry and encourage services and technology, said Zhou. He said that might lead to higher demand in India or Southeast Asia if manufacturing of products such as smartphones that require glass, metal and other energy-intensive components migrates there.

“You have a lot of countries that could become a new manufacturing hub but still rely on coal-fired power,” he said.

No new coal-fired capacity

India’s government said in December it needed no new coal-fired capacity until at least 2027. But industry leaders expect work to resume on power projects that have been suspended.

Analysts also warn India is just setting out on a vast and energy-hungry process of building highways and other infrastructure, while China has completed that cycle.

“What happens in India is still an open question,” said Navroz Dubash of the Centre for Policy Research, a New Delhi think tank. “It’s important not to switch from the point of view that coal is inevitable to coal is unnecessary. I don’t think we’re there yet.”

In Japan, the amount of power generated from coal should fall by 40 percent from 2015 levels by 2030 due to lower demand and more use of alternative sources, the IEEFA report said.

“The economic arguments will win out,” said Paul Fisher, an economist at Cambridge University’s Institute for Sustainable Leadership. “Once the financial sector sees that it’s not in their interest to finance fossil fuels, we’ll get there.”
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When it comes to the deployment and use of an HIV vaccine, researchers say even a partially effective vaccine, although not perfect, still could prevent millions of infections each year.

There are no AIDS vaccines in use, but many are in the development pipeline or clinical trials. The problem is the vaccines are turning out to be less effective than hoped.

To get a handle on what the future might hold, scientists at Oregon State University developed a mathematical model of HIV progression, transmission and intervention, tailored to 127 countries around the world.

According to the model, using current interventions, the world might expect to see about 49 million new cases of HIV in the next 20 years.

But the study concluded that 25 million of those infections might be prevented if ambitious targets for diagnosis, treatment and viral suppression set by the United Nations are met.  

And that’s where an HIV vaccine comes in.

Jan Medlock, the study’s lead author, said adding a vaccine to the mix — even one that is only 50 percent effective — by 2020 could prevent another 6.3 million new infections, potentially reversing the HIV pandemic.

“Partial efficacy is still better than zero efficacy, and it really becomes (a matter) of thinking about the cost and trade-off,” she said. “Are you taking away money from treatment or some other health program to buy these vaccines?  If not, then they’re probably worth doing, even at very low efficacy.”

Medlock’s model — reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — input clinical data from a vaccine that’s now in large-scale trials in South Africa.  

Until it was modified for the phase-three trial in the hopes of boosting its effectiveness, the vaccine candidate showed about a 60 percent efficacy in preventing infection for the first year. The effectiveness dropped to 31 percent 3½ years later.

Even without an improvement in current levels of HIV detection and treatment globally, a vaccine that’s only 50 percent effective has the potential to avert 17 million new cases during the next two decades, Medlock said.

Medlock added an even less effective vaccine could make a sizeable dent to slow the pandemic.

“Twenty percent efficacy at the global population scale is still going to prevent several million infections,” she said.

Medlock said many countries will inevitably fall short of the U.N.’s ambitious goals to contain the HIV pandemic.  

That’s why researchers believe the firepower of imperfect HIV vaccines should be brought to bear in the fight against the AIDS virus.
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Wastewater from households, industries and agriculture should not be seen as a problem but a valuable resource which could help meet the demands for water, energy and nutrients from a growing global population, a U.N. water expert said.

Globally, more than 80 percent of wastewater is released into rivers and lakes without treatment with a negative impact on health and the environment, according to the 2017 U.N. World Water Development Report published on Wednesday.

Pollution from human and animal waste affects nearly one in three rivers in Latin America, Asia and Africa, putting millions of lives at risk, it said.

But wastewater contains nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrates which can be turned into fertilizer, said Richard Connor, editor-in-chief of the report.

Treated sludge can be turned into biogas that could power wastewater treatment plants or be sold on the market, he added.

“Wastewater itself is a valuable resource, even the term wastewater is an oxymoron,” Connor told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“We need to stop seeing it as a burden to be dealt with. It’s not a waste and should not be a waste, especially in this world of water scarcity,” he said by phone from Perugia.

With the world’s population expected to grow by one third to more than 9 billion by 2050, the world will need 55 percent more water and 70 percent more energy, the United Nations says.

Population growth will also lead to a 70 percent increase in demand for food, putting more pressure on water through farming, which is already the biggest consumer of water.

More people also means more wastewater, including from sanitation, which governments have pledged to improve as part of development goals agreed by U.N. member states in 2015.

Increased wastewater is one of the biggest challenges associated with the growth of informal settlements in rapidly expanding cities in developing countries, the report said.

Connor said even though wastewater is a valuable resource, what often stops governments from investing in treatment plants is the cost while what puts people off using it is the “yuck factor”.

Yet the International Space Station has been using the same water for 17 years, Connor noted.

“One morning it’s tea, by the afternoon it’s pee and then the next morning somebody is shaving with it,” he said.

A solution for governments is to invest in smaller, decentralized treatment systems, which cost a fraction of conventional plants and require less maintenance, Connor said.

He added that not all water needs to be treated to drinking water quality but to a level where it is safe to use by industries, municipalities, agriculture or for cooling in power plants.

“You go for what’s affordable and design the level of treatment according to your needs,” Connor said.

“The key word is ‘fit for purpose treatment’.”
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Thirty-three of Europe’s most polluted cities are in Poland. Part of the reason: in winter, people keep warm by burning coal. Northern China has a similar problem. And it’s a big problem. Burning coal pours particulate matter into the atmosphere, which contributes to global warming and significant health problems. But some simple technology may help reduce the problem. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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The cost for individual homes in the U.S. to “go solar” has dropped by more than 60 percent over the last decade.

Those low costs helped convince more than a million Americans to install solar panels on their roofs.

Now schools are beginning to get in on the benefits. One of them is the school system in Fremont, Indiana.

The residents of this small town in America’s upper Midwest have always relied on the sun to warm their fields and draw tourists to their lakes. Now school superintendent William Stitt said they’re counting on it to power their schools.

“The technology has advanced so much in the last couple of years that it’s become more energy efficient, more cost effective for schools to get solar energy,” Stitt said.

Start-up cost

Construction of the solar project will cost $3 million. But when finished, it will completely power the elementary, middle and high school buildings. It may generate so much electricity, that the school will be able to sell some back to the power company at a profit.

The system will work through several rows of 3,000-4,000 panels each. They will be located in a special 2.5 hectare solar field behind the middle school.

The district has to lease the equipment from the local power company for 20 years, at a fixed rate.

But Kim Quick, facility director, said that even with that added cost, the schools should save money because the panels should last 40 years.

“[It] is going to cost us approximately the same amount we’re paying for utilities today. So that cost is never going to increase for the next 20 years,” Quick said. “So if the power company comes in next year and says, ‘We want to increase utilities 6 percent,’ we’re going to pay the same we’re paying today 20 years from now.”

Free electricity, eventually

In 20 years, the school district will own the equipment outright, meaning it won’t pay anything for electricity.

Since the panels are always “on,” Quick said the district will save additional money by banking the unused electricity that’s generated when school is not in session.

“These work year-round. Even in a full moon they will produce electricity,” he said.

Just 3 percent of the nation’s 125,000 schools use some form of solar energy. While not all can use solar power cost-effectively, a recent report by the Solar Foundation found that 72,000 US schools could save money with solar.

Schools could install panels on their roofs or elevate a field of panels over a parking lot. Those innovations would save most schools an average of $1 million over 30 years.

Educational component

Going solar also offers schools an educational component. It provides teachers opportunities to incorporate lessons in science, technology, engineering, and math into the curriculum.

All three schools in the Fremont system will have a live display module that kids can visit daily to learn how much energy is being used and saved.

If all goes according to plan, Fremont School District’s new solar field will be up and running by mid-summer. Superintendent Stitt is already looking further ahead.

“I’d love the community and the kids in 40 years to go, ‘Man, they made a great decision 40 years ago by creating this solar project!’ ” he said.
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The biggest construction project in Europe is taking place beneath the British capital, London.

The largely subterranean Crossrail route linking Heathrow airport to the eastern financial district and beyond is designed to ease congestion as London’s population grows; but, it has also unearthed a trove of archaeological finds that provide a fascinating window on eight thousand years of the city’s history.

“The great thing about the Crossrail project is that it’s allowed us to basically sort of take a slice through London. We’ve been amazed at the quantity, tens of thousands of artifacts,” said Jackie Keily, curator of “The Archaeology of Crossrail” exhibition at the Museum of London – itself housed in a 200-year-old shipping warehouse in the old docks next to the River Thames.

Among the highlights is a bronze medallion dating from the year 245 AD, when southern Britain was ruled by the Romans.

“It would have been given by the emperor to a high-ranking official, probably in Rome. And it’s quite fascinating that it’s traveled right across the Empire to be here in London,” Keily said.

Nearby, a glass case contains a dozen carefully worked metal discs. These “hipposandals” were an early form of horse shoe designed to aid pack animals as they negotiated the rain-soaked streets of Roman London.

Many of the finds hint at macabre rituals. Hundreds of skulls were found beneath what is now the financial heart of London. Could the victims have been executed and put on display as a warning? Were they the losers of gladiatorial battles at the nearby Roman amphitheater?

One of the most striking exhibits is the decapitated skeleton of a Roman woman found buried beneath what is now Liverpool Street station. The skull is placed between the leg bones.

“To have placed the head between the legs one feels was almost certainly sending some sort of message, either about the person or was some kind of ritual associated with the burial,” Keily said.

The Crossrail route tunnels through several graveyards, many dating to major disease outbreaks such as the “Black Death” in the mid-1300s. That plague pandemic wiped out much of London’s population and killed an estimated 1.5 million people across Britain.

Despite the panic that swept across Europe at the time, archaeologists have noted that burials appear to have been conducted with as much dignity as possible. There are few mass graves and most burial sites were dug in an orderly fashion. Some held up to 20,000 bodies.

Lighter aspects of London life are also on display: a bowling ball found in the moat of a 16th century manor house, perhaps lost beneath the murky water during a high society summer party. Laws prevented lower class peasants from partaking in such revelry.

A collection of leather shoes has survived five centuries buried in the London mud. Some are plain with rounded toes, patched up and well worn. Others appear to have barely been used, their tapering ends suggestive of the modern stiletto heel.

“So very fashionable shoes that Londoners were wearing. It connects us in a way with people in the past,” Keily noted.

Despite the painstaking archaeological work each time something new is unearthed, construction of Crossrail remains on schedule. The first trains are due to take passengers through the tunnels in late 2018.
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Animal testing has become problematic in the past few decades. Animal rights activists have uncovered numerous instances of animal cruelty, and it’s also expensive to keep animal test subjects, especially if they’re treated humanely. But how else can pharmaceutical companies test the effectiveness, and safety of their products, some of which could save thousands of lives? The answer to that problem may be wriggling in a laboratory petri dish. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Fifty thousand Haitians will have access to quality health care for the first time after a modern new hospital opened Monday in the isolated and impoverished Cotes-de-Fer region.

The Bishop Joseph M. Sullivan Center for Health will serve those who, until now, had to travel for hours on rough roads for treatment.

The new hospital is a project of the nonprofit charity Catholic Medical Mission Board. The U.S.- based group Mercy Health contributed $2 million for construction costs.

“With active involvement of the community and an emphasis on training and knowledge sharing, the health center will strengthen the local health system in a long-term and sustainable way,” said CMMB’s director in Haiti, Dr. Dianne Jean-Francois.

Along with an emergency room and pharmacy, the new hospital will give pregnant women a place to deliver their babies, along with postnatal and pediatric care.

The hospital also has plans for expansion for dental and ophthalmology clinics.
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An experimental anti-malaria vaccine has been developed that protects against more than one strain of the malaria parasite that causes the mosquito-borne illness.  

The vaccine, tested by principal investigator Kirsten Lyke and colleagues, is called PfSPZ and uses whole, live weakened early versions of the most common form of malaria Plasmodium falciparum (P. Falciparum), called sporozoites.

This early form of the parasite is what’s first injected into humans by an infected mosquito.  

By using the entire sporozoite in the vaccine, the immune system responds to more of the parasite, according to Lyke.

15 healthy adults tested

A study of the vaccine conducted by Lyke and colleagues, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, enrolled 15 healthy adults who were assigned to receive three doses of the vaccine over several months.  

Nineteen weeks after receiving the final dose, the volunteers were exposed to bites of mosquitoes carrying one strain of parasite from Africa.

A second group of six controls that was not vaccinated also got exposed to the mosquitoes. They showed signs of malaria and were promptly treated.

Nine of 14 vaccinated participants, or 64 percent, showed no signs of infection after exposure.  

Of the nine, six participants were selected and exposed to a different strain, 33 weeks after the final immunization.

This time, five of the six were protected against this second strain, according to Lyke.

‘Great’ is not good enough

“Which is great, but not good enough,” said Lyke. “I mean, you don’t want to take a vaccine that’s going to give you a two out of three chance of being protected. So we have to improve on that and get it up to as close to 100 percent as we can. But at least we’ve established that we can get very high protection in six months and we’re seeing cross-strain protection.”

The agent would offer broader protection against a disease that kills mostly young children in sub-Saharan Africa.  

According to the World Health Organization, 212 million people were infected with the mosquito-carrying parasite in 2015, and 429,000 died.  

There are four types of malaria parasite that typically infect people. The most common and deadly is Plasmodium falciparum, which goes through a number of life-cycle stages during which the parasite evolves into a different form.  

That is what makes it difficult to develop a vaccine.  

Multiple strains a problem

The problem is further complicated by the fact that P. falciparum can mutate and develop into multiple strains.

Lyke said this is particularly true in Africa, in places where the disease is common.

“The falciparum malaria that is so endemic, there’s a lot of genetic change that occurs because it’s so prevalent in the population. And that contributes to different strains of the falciparum malaria so that you know any vaccine that we’d want to introduce we would want to make sure that it broadly covers multiple different strains of falciparum malaria,” Lyke said.

Clinical trials of the early vaccine, produced by the company Sanaria, also are going on in Africa, including in Burkina Faso, Kenya and Bioko Island off of Africa’s west coast.
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Tanzania has announced a plan to send 500 doctors to Kenya after a doctors’ strike paralyzed health services in the neighboring country for months. Kenyan doctors, however, say the government should not hire any foreign doctors but instead employ the more than 1,000 trained physicians who are unemployed.

Tanzanian President John Magufuli announced the plan to dispatch the doctors after a recent meeting in Dar es Salaam with a visiting Kenyan delegation that included Kenya’s health cabinet secretary, Cleopa Mailu.

Mailu said this was a deal that would benefit both countries.

 

“We have so many government health centers that need doctors,” said Mailu. “Yes, we have doctors in our country; we recently had a doctors’ strike and one of their reasons for their strike was that there were not enough doctors to attend to patients. The doctors were spending a lot of hours attending to the patients.”

Doctors from public hospitals in Kenya went on strike last December to demand a pay raise and improved working conditions for physicians and patients.

A deal struck by the doctors’ union and the government opened the way to negotiations that ended the 100-day-old strike.

 

According to Mailu, it is because of the doctors’ demands that the push to recruit foreign physicians was realized.

 

“There is so much work and we will continue looking for more doctors; we will continue negotiations with the government to see if they will provide us with more doctors so that we can strengthen our health services here in Kenya,” said Mailu.

Dr. Elly Nyaim of the Kenya Medical Practitioners and Dentists Board says the move may not have been clearly thought out.

 

“As per the World Health Organization recommendation, we still have a shortage even with the ones we produce from our universities, that state actually cuts across the entire East Africa… so Tanzania is actually even worse off than we are in terms of the doctor-patient ratio,” said Nyaim.

The physician’s union says Kenya currently has 1,400 doctors who have not been absorbed into the workforce.

 

Low doctor-to-patient ratio

According to the World Health organization, the Tanzanian doctor-to-patient ratio stands at 1 doctor for every 20,000 patients. In Kenya, it’s 1 doctor for every 16,000. The recommended doctor-patient ratio is one to 300.

 

“It would be very unfortunate that you are actually exporting when you do not have enough yourself; it should not be done at the expense of denying qualified Kenyans positions because you are bringing foreigners,” said Nyaim.

In a press briefing held after the meeting with the Kenyan delegation, Tanzania’s president welcomed the new deal with the Kenyan government.

 

“By good luck our friends have said they will pay good salaries and the payment will be in dollars. They will be given accommodation and security,” said Magufuli.

 

Health Secretary Mailu says the Tanzanian doctors will start working in Kenya in April and will be given two to three-year contracts.

And he says there are plan underway to also hire doctors from Cuba.

 

 

 

 
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Would you drink beer made from toilet water?

The brewers at one popular brewery in California are betting you would.

Stone Brewing of San Diego unveiled a new beer made from water that “comes from the toilet,” according to ABC 10 News in San Diego.

Granted, the water for the brew, called Full Circle Pale Ale, is not made from water directly from the toilet, but it does use recycled water from the Pure Water San Diego program, the channel reported.

At the unveiling of the new beer Thursday, San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer called the beer “delicious,” while Stone’s senior manager of brewing and innovation, Steve Gonzalez, said it was among the best pale ales the brewery he has ever made.

Gonzalez told News 10 drinkers would “get some caramel notes, some tropical fruit notes. It’s a very clean tasting beer.”

According to News 10, some attendees at the unveiling were a little sceptical of the beer, but after a taste, they were converted.

“[I thought] that it would have an off taste or be something different to it … it’s outstanding,” Shane Trussell said.

The beer is not yet available to the public, but the brewery said it would be soon.

The Pure Water San Diego program aims to supply one-third of San Diego’s water supply through recycled wastewater.
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Only 17 snowy miles from the Canadian border, Katie Bushey’s most basic needs are met by traveling health aides who come into her home to change her diapers, track her seizures, spoon-feed her fettucine Alfredo and load her wheelchair into the shower.

But that’s only if someone shows up.

Bushey, 32, who lost her vocal and motor skills shortly after birth, is one of more than 180,000 Medicaid patients in New York who are authorized to receive long-term, in-home care, the most in the state’s history. But there are increasingly too few aides to go around, especially in remote, rural areas.

When there aren’t enough aides for Bushey — over a recent two-day stretch there were workers for only four of the 26 hours of care for which she is authorized — her mother must stay home from her job at an elementary school, forgoing a day’s wages and scraping her savings to pay the bills.

Minimum wage

It’s a national problem advocates say could get worse in New York because of a phased-in, $15-an-hour minimum wage that will be statewide by 2021, pushing notoriously poorly paid health aides into other jobs, in retail or fast food, that don’t involve hours of training and the pressure of keeping someone else alive.

“These should not be low-wage jobs,” said Bruce Darling, executive director at the Center for Disability Rights. “We’re paying someone who gives you a burger the same as the person who operates your relative’s ventilator or feeding tubes.”

There are currently 2.2 million home health aides and personal care aides in the U.S., with another 630,000 needed by 2024 as the Baby Boomer generation ages, according to the nonprofit research and consulting group PHI. New York state employs about 326,000 home health workers but is predicted to need another 125,000 by 2024.

For now, home health aides in New York state earn an average of about $11 an hour, though wages are lower in upstate regions. Advocates say the system needs a complete overhaul that focuses on higher pay, worker retention and finding methods of compensation beyond what is provided through Medicaid.

Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo has committed nearly $6 billion in funding for home health care reimbursements in coming years as the agencies transition to the $15 minimum wage.

Statewide initiative

The state’s health department has said it is developing an initiative to attract, recruit and retain home health workers.

New York lawmakers have held hearings on the issue, and both the Senate and Assembly have so far included language in their budgets that would review and restructure how the state transfers Medicaid dollars to the providers, agencies and workers with the aim of providing workers and hours where they are needed most.

Other states are grappling with how to address the dwindling workforce as their minimum wages climb.

In Maine, legislation in 2015 attempted to make personal care worker wages more competitive with specific reimbursements for worker compensation. But a popular initiative will raise the minimum wage to $12 by 2020, minimizing those differences.

In Arizona, minimum wage increases have been accompanied by increased reimbursement rates, and in Washington state, workers negotiated a $15 wage for some home-care workers for when the state minimum increases to $13.50 in 2020.

New York advocates say a higher state minimum wage won’t attract any extra workers in rural regions such as Clinton County, where Bushey lives.

A single agency, North Country Home Services, hires and trains about 300 home health aides and personal care aides for about 1,000 people throughout a mountainous region the size of Connecticut. In any given week, the agency says, it leaves 400 hours of state-authorized care unfilled due to staffing shortages.

Special type of worker

The aides who continue despite the wages are a special breed, said Erica Stranahan, of Plattsburgh, who has worked as a home health aide with North Country for nine years and earns about $12 an hour. Stranahan said several of her co-workers have recently left home care for less-intensive professions that will soon have similar wages.

Stranahan acknowledged she makes it work only by sharing rent and living expenses with her boyfriend. She said she feels a responsibility to those she cares for, and would rather find a second job than quit caring for others.

“I enjoy helping people,” she said. “We’re with them for so many hours. It’s almost like we’re a second family for them,” Stranahan said.

But Rosalie Kline, a personal care aide in Canandaigua for nearly 13 years who also struggles to make ends meet, said that if worse came to worst, she would find another job that paid more.

“I wouldn’t want to. I love my job,” she said. “But I might need to.”
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Eight million metric tons of plastic wind up each year in the oceans, harming marine life and entering the food chain. Mike O’Sullivan reports a new documentary film called “A Plastic Ocean” looks at the problem, and its solutions.
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For some medical students, getting a yes or no Friday was more important than finding the right life partner.

Friday was “Match Day,” the annual day when medical students find out which U.S. medical institution has accepted them for a residency program. It is a competition, of sorts: 32,000 training slots are available for 42,000 applicants, according to this year’s data.

A residency, three to five years of practical experience and training in a student’s chosen medical specialty, is the next step after medical school, which in the United States generally means four years of postgraduate university studies.

Of those 42,000 applicants vying for residencies, all but about 6,000 are foreign nationals. And that is where their aspirations could collide with President Donald Trump’s latest executive order regulating immigration to the United States.

‘Extensive upheaval’

The National Residency Match Program (NRMP), a nonprofit group that organizes the matches between students and hospitals, said the new immigration order has had a substantial impact on its program. In its current revised form, the order bans citizens from six Muslim-majority countries from traveling to the U.S., at least temporarily.

“The consequences of the [January 27] executive order are far-reaching for match applicants, and the upheaval it is causing is extensive,” NRMP’s chair, Dr. Maria Savoia, and CEO Mona Signer said in a joint statement.

“The affected applicants have worked hard for many years to achieve their goal of becoming physicians,” the two medical-education experts said, “and they should not be denied that opportunity because of a blanket policy that does not consider the individual.”

U.S. courts have issued a restraining order preventing enforcement of the travel ban, pending further legal arguments, but NRMP says it is concerned that some immigrants or foreign medical students with valid visas will nevertheless be delayed or rejected at U.S. borders.

Holidays at home are not care-free

In addition, foreign medical students who travel to their home countries during holidays or breaks in their university studies fear they may not be able to return in time to take up their new residencies in the U.S. Such medical programs typically begin each year on July 1.

“U.S. training programs should be able to select applicants based on their excellent character and qualifications, without regard to nationality. Both applicants and programs benefit from an orderly process for entry into graduate medical education,” said Signer, who is a public health specialist, and Savoia. “The executive order disrupts that process very considerably.”

Hospitals and other medical institutions that offer residencies worry that foreign students they choose for the multiyear training programs will be unable to begin their studies on schedule, Signer said.

Medical residencies are sometimes known as internships, or first-year post-graduate studies, because they occur during a fledgling doctor’s first year of practical training alongside or under direct supervision of a fully qualified physician in one of 21 recognized medical specialties.

Is US becoming less welcoming?

Those who administer medical residency programs do not directly choose the candidates they would like to attract. Instead they rank applicants in order of preference. Under those conditions, Signer said, “It seems likely that residency program directors will be reluctant to rank J-1 visa applicants because they may not be able to enter the country to begin training.”

The U.S. State Department’s J-1 visa program offers foreign nationals an opportunity to come to the United States “to teach, study, conduct research, demonstrate special skills or receive on-the-job training for periods ranging from a few weeks to several years,” according to Cultural Vistas, a nonprofit American group that has been organizing international exchange programs since 1963.

The perception that the United States is becoming less welcoming to foreign nationals in the medical professions appears to be having an effect.

Fewer non-U.S. citizen “international medical school graduates,” or IMGs, submitted program choices for this year: 7,284 in 2017 vs. 7,460 in 2016. However, NRMP said more of these candidates (52.4 percent) were matched with institutions – the highest match rate since 2005.

Foreign physicians benefit all Americans

About 1,800 IMGs already enrolled in accredited residency and fellowship programs in the U.S. are impacted by the travel ban, according to Dr. Thomas J. Nasca, CEO of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.

“These physicians are providing much needed medical care to a conservatively estimated 900,000 patients in urban, suburban and rural communities across the country annually. They are a valued and welcomed group of colleagues,” he wrote in a statement.

“Many communities, including rural and low-income areas, often have problems attracting physicians to meet their health care needs. To address these gaps in care, IMGs often fill these openings. These physicians are licensed by the same stringent requirements applied to U.S. medical school graduates,” the chief executive officer of the American Medical Association, Dr. James Madara, wrote last month.

“The medical education community must support all international medical graduates and their families during these difficult times,” NRMP’s statement said.
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Washington’s National Zoo hired its first animal nutritionist 30 years ago. Since then the zoo has been preparing specific, well-balanced meals for each animal, provided by volunteers and food preparation teams. For Yahya Barzinji, Elizabeth Cherneff reports.
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In a medical emergency, an ambulance with a qualified medical team on board can be a lifesaver. But in Nepal, this service is rare if not nonexistent. To help provide the best possible medical emergency services, a team of doctors from Stanford University in California spent 12 weeks training four dozen medical technicians in Kathmandu. VOA’s Faiza Elmasry has more. Faith Lapidus narrates.
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