In Congo, more than 600 people have contracted the Ebola virus which has claimed close to 400 lives. The disease has been difficult to contain because of conflict in the region, despite an effective vaccine. But now, VOA’s Carol Pearson reports, health workers may soon be able to cure those with the disease.
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A new form of social therapy is powering-on in the U.S. A group of former toy company employees bought a brand from their ex-employer and started developing robotic household animals that serve as friends and therapy aids to America’s growing elderly population. Arash Arabasadi reports.
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In northeastern Congo, more than 600 people have fallen ill with the Ebola virus, and at least 368 people have died from the disease. It’s been difficult to contain the virus because of conflict in the region, despite medical advances, including a vaccine.
The Democratic Republic of Congo is where Ebola was first discovered in 1976, when the country was called Zaire. The disease was named after the Ebola River where the virus was spreading. Between then and 2013, there was no treatment or a vaccine. The outbreak ran its course in quarantined communities.
Scientists started studying the virus, however, trying to come up with better ways to handle its various deadly strains. They succeeded in producing a vaccine to help end the Ebola epidemic that swept through three West African countries between 2013 and 2016. More than 11,000 people died in that outbreak.
Treatment found
At that time, treatment for the Zaire strain of Ebola was developed. It was costly to produce and didn’t work on two other lethal strains, the Sudan and Bundibugyo viruses.
But now scientists have found one. Their research produced a drug cocktail called MBP134 that helped monkeys infected with three deadly strains of Ebola recover from the disease.
What’s more, the treatment requires a single intravenous injection.
Thomas Geisbert, Ph.D., led the research at the University of Texas Medical Branch, part of a public-private partnership that also included Mapp Biopharmaceuticals, the U.S. Army Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and the Public Health Agency of Canada.
Must treat all strains
In an interview with VOA, Geisbert stressed the need for a treatment that would be effective against all strains of Ebola.
“When an outbreak occurs, we really don’t know which one of those three strains, species, we call them, is the cause of that particular episode,” Geisbert said.
He added that the treatments available have been effective only against the Zaire species, which leaves people infected with the other species unprotected.
“Our goal was to develop a treatment that would work regardless of the particular strain of Ebola that was causing it,” Geisbert said.
“If I have to make a drug that only works against Zaire, and another drug that only works against Sudan and another drug that only works against the Bundibugyo species, that is extremely expensive,” he added.
Geisbert said the treatment will save valuable time in determining which strain of Ebola is circulating in a particular outbreak. It will save lives because people can be treated immediately, and it will also save money.
No profit
There’s no profit for the pharmaceutical companies that produce the drugs.
“It’s not like you’re making up vaccine for flu where companies [are] going to make a profit. There’s really a small global market for Ebola so it really has to be sponsored by the government,” he said.
In addition to the U.S. Army and the Canadian government, the U.S. National Institutes of Health has supported much of this research.
Geisbert said the work ahead involves tweaking the dose to its lowest possible amount, making it easier to distribute — again to reduce costs — and conducting clinical trials in humans to ensure the treatment is safe and effective.
Geisbert is confident it will work in humans, although he cautioned that in science, nothing is certain.
The treatment may not be ready to help those with Ebola in the Congo outbreak, but the promise is that countries affected by the virus could have the treatment at the ready to stop future Ebola outbreaks.
It also means that should someone with Ebola walk into a hospital outside of Africa, as happened in Texas when a Liberian man sought treatment, the patient can be cured, and health care workers can be protected.
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Cancer in your esophagus, the tube that runs from your throat to your stomach, is one of the most frequently reported and a leading cause of cancer deaths around the world. Most cases are reported in developing countries. Early esophageal cancer typically causes no symptoms. However, its chemical markers are present in the earliest stage. A new device being tested in England takes advantage of that to allow early detection of esophageal and other types of cancer. Faith Lapidus reports.
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Researchers say there’s a new calf among the population of critically endangered killer whales that live in the waters between Washington state and Canada.
Ken Balcomb, founding director of the Center for Whale Research, told The Seattle Times that staff first saw the calf Friday at the eastern end of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
He said the youngster looks healthy, but survival rates for baby orcas are only about 50 percent.
The whales have been starving amid a dearth of salmon. Vessel noise and pollution have complicated their plight. No calf born in the last three years has survived.
One whale drew international attention when she carried her dead calf on her head for 17 days last summer.
Two other orcas are known to be sick, and researchers fear they could die within months.
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A “substantial number” of women would lose free birth control coverage under new rules by the Trump administration that allow more employers to opt out of providing the benefit, a U.S. judge said at a hearing Friday.
Judge Haywood Gilliam appeared inclined to grant a request by California and other states that he block the rules while the states’ lawsuit moves forward. He said he would rule before Monday, when the rules are set to take effect.
The changes would allow more employers, including publicly traded companies, to opt out of providing no-cost contraceptive coverage to women by claiming religious objections. Some private employers could also object on moral grounds.
Gilliam said the new rules would be a “massive policy shift” to women who lose coverage.
The judge previously blocked an interim version of those rules — a decision that was upheld in December by an appeals court.
The case is before him again after the administration finalized the measures in November, prompting a renewed legal challenge by California and other states.
At issue is a requirement under President Barack Obama’s health care law that birth control services be covered at no additional cost. Obama officials included exemptions for religious organizations. The Trump administration expanded those exemptions and added “moral convictions” as a basis to opt out of providing birth control services.
Karli Eisenberg, an attorney for California, told Gilliam on Friday the loss of free contraceptive coverage from employers would force women to turn to government programs that provide birth control, and if they are ineligible for those, increase the risk of unintended pregnancies.
“It’s undisputed that these rules will create barriers,” she said.
The rules violate the Affordable Care Act, including a provision that forbids discrimination, she said.
Justin Sandberg, an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, said the health care law already had exemptions for contraceptive coverage that left millions of women without the benefit. He said the birth control requirement was a “substantial burden” on employers with religious objections.
The rules “protect a narrow class of sincere religious and moral objectors from being forced to facilitate practices that conflict with their beliefs,” the U.S. Department of Justice said in court documents.
The states argue that millions of women could lose free birth control services under the new rules. They want Gilliam to issue a preliminary injunction blocking the rules for the entire nation.
Gilliam questioned whether a nationwide injunction was appropriate. He noted that a federal judge in Massachusetts had ruled against a similar challenge to the birth control rules, but a nationwide injunction would nonetheless block them in that state.
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An estimated 69,000 to 84,000 Americans were hospitalized due to the flu in the last three months, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Friday.
The nation saw one of the worst flu outbreaks in nearly a decade during the 2017-2018 season, with more than 900,000 cases of hospitalizations and over 80,000 deaths, the CDC estimates.
Between Oct. 1, 2018 and Jan. 5, 2019, about 6 million to 7 million people were reported to have contracted the flu, according to data collected by the health agency.
Health regulators have been trying to combat flu outbreaks in the United States and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first new flu medication in nearly two decades last year.
The CDC last month signaled the start of the flu season, saying that 24 states and Guam were reporting widespread cases, with the H1N1 virus being the predominant strain.
The dominant flu strain during the last season, H3N2, has been linked with severe disease and death, particularly among children and the elderly.
The agency continues to recommend vaccination as the best way to reduce the risk of flu and advised people who are at high risk category to approach hospital for treatment with a flu antiviral drug.
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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying 10 Iridium Communications satellites has blasted off from California.
The rocket lifted off at 7:31 a.m. Friday at Vandenberg Air Force Base and arced over the Pacific Ocean west of Los Angeles.
SpaceX will try to land the Falcon’s first stage on an autonomous vessel floating in the ocean.
The payload is the eighth and final set of satellites to be launched as Iridium replaces its entire globe-circling fleet with next-generation orbiters. Deployment of the satellites is scheduled to be completed a little over an hour after liftoff.
If successful, Iridium will have a total of 75 new satellites in orbit, including nine spares.
Iridium is deorbiting its original fleet of satellites.
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China on Friday broadcast pictures taken by its rover and lander on the moon’s far side, in what its space program hailed as another triumph for the groundbreaking mission to the less-understood sector of the lunar surface.
The pictures on state broadcaster CCTV showed the Jade Rabbit 2 rover and the Chang’e 4 spacecraft that transported it on the first-ever soft landing on the far side of the moon, which always faces away from Earth.
The pictures were transmitted by a relay satellite to a control center in Beijing, although it wasn’t immediately clear when they were taken.
“The lander, its rover, and the relay satellite are all in a stable condition. They have reached the predetermined engineering goals, right now they are getting into the stage of scientific searches,” Zhang Kejian, director of the China National Space Administration, said before engineers at the Beijing center.
“Now I declare that the Chang’e 4 mission, as a part of the Chang’e Lunar Exploration Program, has been a success,” Zhang said.
Pictures transmitted back show a rocky surface with the jagged edge of craters in the background, posing a challenge for controllers in plotting the rover’s future travels, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
Among the images is a 360-degree panorama stitched together from 80 photos taken by a camera on the lander after it released the rover onto the lunar surface, Xinhua said, citing Li Chunlai, deputy director of the National Astronomical Observatories of China and commander-in-chief of the ground application system of Chang’e 4.
“From the panorama, we can see the probe is surrounded by lots of small craters, which was really thrilling,” Li was quoted as saying.
The space administration also released a 12-minute video of Chang’e 4’s landing utilizing more than 4,700 images taken by an on-board camera. The probe is shown adjusting its altitude, speed and pitch as it seeks to avoid obstacles on the ground.
Researchers hope that low-frequency observations of the cosmos from the far side of the moon, where radio signals from Earth are blocked, will help scientists learn more about the early days of the solar system and birth of the universe’s first stars.
The far side has been observed many times from lunar orbits, but never explored on the surface. It is popularly called the “dark side” because it can’t be seen from Earth and is relatively unknown, not because it lacks sunlight.
The pioneering landing highlights China’s ambitions to rival the U.S., Russia and Europe in space through manned flights and the planned construction of a permanent space station.
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Victoria Graham is a beauty queen. But what is truly extraordinary about this pageant winner are her efforts to overcome a severe genetic condition so that she could use her title wins to highlight her illness. Anush Avetisyan reports from Manchester, Maryland.
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Could the devices being blamed for teen depression be useful in revealing it?
Studies have linked heavy smartphone use with worsening teen mental health. But as teens spend time on sites like Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube, they also leave digital trails that may offer signs about their mental well-being.
Experts say possible warning signs include changes in writing speed, voice quality, word choice and how often a student stays home from school.
There are more than 1,000 smartphone “biomarkers,” said Dr. Thomas Insel, former head of the National Institute of Mental Health, which is the largest mental health research organization in the world. Insel is a leader in the smartphone psychiatry movement.
Researchers are testing smartphone apps that use artificial intelligence, or AI, to predict depression and possible self-harm. Using smartphones as mental health detectors require permission from users to download an app, and permission could be revoked any time.
Nick Allen, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, has created an app being tested on young people who have attempted suicide. Allen says the biggest barrier is discerning the mental health crisis signals in the information on people’s phones.
Suicide is the second leading cause of death for people between the ages of 10 and 34 in the United States. By 2015, suicide rates among teen boys rose to 14 in every 100,000 and five in every 100,000 people, among girls. A recent study suggested a rise in smartphone use has probably worsened the crisis.
People with mental illness, Insel said, usually get treatment “when they’re in crisis and very late. … We want to have a method to identify the earliest signs.”
If smartphones can become effective predictors, app developers say the goal might be to offer automated text messages and links to assistance, or digital messages to parents, doctors and first responders.
Facebook employs “proactive detection.” Last year, after a suicide was broadcast on Facebook Live, the company trained its AI systems to look for words in online posts that could predict possible self-harm. Friends’ comments expressing concern about the user’s well-being are part of that detection system.
Facebook has helped first responders quickly reach around 3,500 people in the past year. But the company did not offer followup details on those people.
Ongoing research includes a Stanford University study of about 200 teens. Many of them are at risk for depression because of bullying, family issues or other problems. Teens who have been studied since grade school get an experimental phone app that asks them questions about their mood three times a day for two weeks.
Laurel Foster, 15, is part of the study. Foster said she is stressed about school and friendships. Depression is common at her San Francisco high school, she said. The smartphone app felt a little like being spied on, she said, but many websites are already following users’ behaviors.
Alyssa Lizarraga, 19, is also part of the study. Lizarraga said she has had depression since high school, and worries about her heavy use of smartphones and social media. She said comparing herself with others online sometimes causes her sadness. But she believes using smartphones to identify mental health problems might help push people to seek early treatment.
At the University of California, Los Angeles, researchers offer online counseling and an experimental phone app to students who show signs of at least minor depression on a test. It is part of a larger effort launched in 2017 by the university to battle depression in its students. About 250 UCLA students agreed to use the app during their first year.
At the University of Illinois’ Chicago campus, researchers are using crowdsourcing to test their experimental phone app. Nearly 2,000 people have downloaded the app and agreed to let researchers follow typing behaviors. Alex Leow, a professor of psychiatry and bioengineering at the university, helped develop the app.
The study is for people 18 and older, but Leow said it could also be used for children if successful.
Along with studies at universities, technology companies such as Mindstrong and Verily — the tech health division of Google — are testing their own experimental apps.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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The world’s oceans are rising in temperature faster than previously believed as they absorb most of the world’s growing climate-changing emissions, scientists said Thursday.
Ocean heat – recorded by thousands of floating robots – has been setting records repeatedly over the last decade, with 2018 expected to be the hottest year yet, displacing the 2017 record, according to an analysis by the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
That is driving sea level rise, as oceans warm and expand, and helping fuel more intense hurricanes and other extreme weather, scientists warn.
The warming, measured since 1960, is faster than predicted by scientists in a 2013 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that looked at ocean warming, according to the study, published this week in the journal Science.
“It’s mainly driven by the accumulation of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to human activities,” said Lijing Cheng, a lead author of the study from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
The increasing rate of ocean warming “is simply a signature of increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,” Cheng said.
Leading climate scientists said in October that the world has about 12 years left to shift the world away from still rising emission toward cleaner renewable energy systems, or risk facing some of the worst impacts of climate change.
Those include worsening water and food shortages, stronger storms, heatwaves and other extreme weather, and rising seas.
For the last 13 years, an ocean observing system called Argo has been used to monitor changes in ocean temperatures, Cheng said, leading to more reliable data that is the basis for the new ocean heat records.
The system uses almost 4,000 drifting ocean robots that dive to a depth of 2,000 meters every few days, recording temperature and other indicators as they float back to the surface.
Through the data collected, scientists have documented increases in rainfall intensity and more powerful storms such as hurricanes Harvey in 2017 and Florence in 2018.
Cheng explained that oceans are the energy source for storms, and can fuel more powerful ones as temperatures – a measure of energy – rise.
Storms over the 2050-2100 period are expected, statistically, to be more powerful than storms from the 1950-2000 period, the scientist said.
Cheng said that the oceans, which have so far absorbed over 90 percent of the additional sun’s energy trapped by rising emissions, will see continuing temperature hikes in the future.
Because the ocean has large heat capacity it is characterized as a ˜delayed response” to global warming, which means that the ocean warming could be more serious in the future,” the researcher said.
“For example, even if we meet the target of Paris Agreement (to limit climate change), ocean will continue warming and sea level will continue rise. Their impacts will continue.” If the targets of the Paris deal to hold warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius, or preferably 1.5C can be met, however, expected damage by 2100 could be halved, Cheng said.
For now, however, climate changing emissions continue to rise, and I don’t think enough is being done to tackle the rising temperatures,” Cheng said.
Congo’s Health Ministry says a baby has been born to a mother who recovered from the Ebola virus — a bright spot in an outbreak that is the second-deadliest in history.
The Health Ministry tweeted a photo of “baby Sylvana” in her smiling mother’s arms.
The ministry says the baby is the first in this outbreak born to a mother who has recovered. This is rare, though babies have been born to Ebola survivors in previous outbreaks.
Baby Sylvana was born on Sunday at an Ebola treatment center in Beni, a troubled city where rebel attacks have threatened health workers’ attempts to contain the outbreak.
The Health Ministry says that “she is in good health and is not infected with Ebola.”
This outbreak has killed more than 330 people.
Astronomers in Canada have detected a mysterious volley of radio waves from far outside our galaxy, according to two studies published Wednesday in Nature.
What corner of the universe these powerful waves come from and the forces that produced them remain unknown.
The so-called repeating fast radio bursts were identified during the trial run last summer of a built-for-purpose telescope running at only a fraction of its capacity.
Known by its acronym CHIME, the world’s most powerful radio telescope, spread across an area as big as a football pitch, is poised to detect many more of the enigmatic pulses now that it is fully operational.
“At the end of the year, we may have found 1,000 bursts,” said Deborah Good, a PhD student at the University of British Columbia and one of 50 scientists from five institutions involved in the research.
High energy bursts
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) flash only for a micro-instant, but can emit as much energy as the sun does in 10,000 years.
Exactly what causes these high-energy surges of long waves at the far end of the electromagnetic spectrum remains the subject of intense debate.
More than 60 bursts have been cataloged since 2007, but only one other, observed in 2012 at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, was a repeater.
“FRBs, it seems, are likely generated in dense, turbulent regions of host galaxies,” Shriharsh Tendulkar, a corresponding author for both studies and an astronomer at McGill University, told AFP.
Cosmic convulsions created by the turbulent gas clouds that give rise to stars, or stellar explosions such a supernovae, are both possible incubators.
But consecutive radio bursts are a special case.
No little green men
“The fact that the bursts are repeated rules out any cataclysmic models in which the source is destroyed while generating the burst,” Tendulkar added.
“An FRB emitted from a merger of two neutron stars, or a neutron star and a black hole, for example, cannot repeat.”
It is not yet clear whether the breeding grounds of repeating bursts are different from those that produce only a single radio pulse.
Significantly, the 2012 and 2018 “repeaters” have strikingly similar properties.
CHIME (Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment) also spotted a dozen single burst radio waves, but with an unusual profile.
Most FRBs spotted so far have wavelengths of a few centimeters, but these had intervals of nearly a meter, opening up a whole new line of inquiry for astronomers.
Could these enigmatic radio pulses point to intelligence elsewhere in the Universe? Might they be messages in a bottle?
“It is extremely, extremely unlikely,” Tendulkar said.
“As a scientist I can’t rule it out 100 percent. But intelligent life is not on the minds of any astronomer as a source of these FRBs.”
Constructed in British Columbia, CHIME is composed of four, 100-meter long half-pipe cylinders of metal mesh, which reconstruct images of the sky by processing the radio signals recorded by more than a thousand antennas.
“This signal processing system is the largest of any telescope on Earth,” the researchers said in a communique.
The other institutions with leading roles are the University of Toronto, the National Research Council of Canada, and the Perimeter Institute.
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Drivers on the U.S. East Coast may soon start paying for their climate pollution.
Nine states and the District of Columbia have announced plans to introduce a system that puts a price on the carbon dioxide produced from burning gasoline and diesel fuel.
As the federal government pulls back from taking action on climate change, the proposal is an example of how states and cities are aiming to move forward.
Details are slim at this point, but the Transportation and Climate Initiative would likely require fuel suppliers to pay for each ton of carbon dioxide that burning their products would produce. Costs would presumably be passed on to consumers.
The announcement says revenues would go toward improving transportation infrastructure and low-emissions alternatives to cars, trucks and buses.
The program could raise $1.5 billion to $6 billion per year, by one estimate.
“You can imagine, that could do a lot to modernize transportation infrastructure, improve mass transit, build out electric transportation options,” said Fatima Ahmad at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, based in Washington, D.C.
Reducing traffic congestion, “which is legendary in this area,” is a priority for the region’s lawmakers, she added. Those investments could create an estimated 91,000 to 125,000 new jobs.
Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. While electric utilities have cut production of carbon dioxide by switching from coal to natural gas and renewables, emissions from the transportation sector have been growing since 2012.
Following California
California is the only state so far that has put a price on carbon emissions from transportation fuels. The state included gas and diesel in its cap-and-trade program beginning in 2015. That program also regulates greenhouse gases from power plants and industries.
For transportation fuels, wholesalers buy the permits and pass on the cost. At the current price of about $15 per ton, the program adds about 13 cents to the cost of a gallon of gas.
The additional cost is less than the differences in pump price among gas stations in the same city, noted communications director Stanley Young at the California Air Resources Board, which administers the program.
“When you consider the few cents that the cap and trade program adds on to [the cost at the pump], it kind-of pales,” he said.
The state has raised more than $9 billion from permit sales since the program began in 2012.
Funds have paid for renewable energy and efficiency upgrades, mass transit, low-emissions vehicles, land preservation and other investments.
To help ease the burden on low-income consumers, a third of the funds are targeted to disadvantaged communities.
However, California’s program has not stopped vehicle CO2 emissions from rising. After a period of decline from 2007 to 2013, greenhouse gases from vehicles have increased every year since then.
The state is studying the impact of car sharing and autonomous vehicles on reducing emissions. Young said officials are also looking into land use planning, so people live closer to work or transit.
“We invented sprawl,” he said, “and now we’re trying to deal with it.”
Hard to change
Transportation is one of the hardest sources of greenhouse gases to tackle, experts say.
Unlike the next biggest source of carbon pollution, power plants, transportation emissions come from millions of individual vehicles, and the choices their owners and drivers make have a big impact on how much carbon dioxide they produce.
There are essentially three ways to reduce their emissions, according to David Bookbinder at the Niskanen Center, a centrist research institution: make vehicles more efficient, reduce the amount of CO2 produced per unit of energy, or raise the price of fuel.
“It’s never popular to raise the price [of fuel],” Bookbinder said. Even so, “you have to really, really, really raise the price of gasoline before it has an impact on people’s use.”
France’s “yellow vest” protests are one extreme reaction to raising fuel prices. They sparked the biggest outrage where driving is least avoidable: outside city centers and in areas lacking good public transit. And they demonstrate another risk: policies that make gas more expensive can have the biggest impact on the people who can least afford it.
One way to reduce the impact is by returning to consumers the money raised by pricing carbon. That’s the preferred approach in a proposal by a group of Republican elder statesmen. Investing in affordable public transit is another, Bookbinder says.
The members of the Transportation and Climate Initiative — Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. — will spend a year designing their individual programs.
Some states can put programs in place with agency regulations. Others will have to go through their state legislatures. That will test voters’ appetites to pay for their climate pollution.
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When Bangkok’s oldest university called for ideas for a symbol to mark its centenary year, landscape architect Kotchakorn Voraakhom successfully pitched a design for a park.
It was intended not only as a welcome green space in the middle of the congested city of about 10 million people, but as a place that could also retain large amounts of water, reducing monsoon flooding around Chulalongkorn University.
Parks and “green roofs” planted with vegetation soak up rain during the annual monsoon and help dense urban centers like Bangkok adapt to climate change, Kotchakorn said.
“We need to be thinking about everything we build in the context of mitigating climate-change impact. It can’t be just about aesthetics, but also about serving a purpose,” she said.
“This was Bangkok’s first park in many years, so we had to make it count,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Bangkok, built on the floodplains of the Chao Phraya River, is expected to be one of the urban areas hit hardest by warming temperatures.
Nearly 40 percent of Bangkok may be inundated each year as soon as 2030 due to more extreme rainfall, according to the World Bank.
The city, once a network of canals that earned it the moniker “Venice of the East,” has filled in many of those water channels for construction, and is sinking by more than 1 centimeter (0.4 inches) each year, according to climate experts.
Flooding in many parts of the city is common during the annual monsoon. The rains in 2011 brought the worst floods in decades, putting a fifth of the city under water.
“With so much construction and fewer canals, there is nowhere for the water to go,” said Kotchakorn, who heads Bangkok-based landscape architecture firm Landprocess.
“But instead of building embankments along the river or thinking of ways to get rid of the water, we should be thinking about how to live with the water – how to manage the water.”
Monkey’s cheeks
From Mumbai to Manila, unchecked sprawl has led to increased and deadly urban flooding.
A plan to build a promenade along the Chao Phraya River will worsen floods in Bangkok, environmentalists warn.
The Thai capital also has one of the lowest ratios of green space: just 3.3 square meters (35.5 sq ft) per person, compared to New York City’s 23.1 sq m and Singapore’s 66, according to the Siemens Green City Index.
A “metro forest” project in a Bangkok suburb has converted two acres (0.8 hectares) of abandoned land into a local forest with native trees, to make a start on reversing urban sprawl.
The city’s 11-acre Chulalongkorn Centenary Park designed by Kotchakorn is inclined at a three-degree angle, so that rain and floodwater flow to its lowest point, into a retention pond.
At the park’s highest end, a museum is topped by a green roof covered with native plants, which filter rainwater before it is stored in large tanks underground.
Rainwater also flows through the park’s lawn and wetlands where native vegetation filters the water, while its walkways are made of porous concrete.
The park can hold up to 1 million gallons of water that can be discharged later or used in the dry season, much like a monkey holds food in its cheeks until it needs to eat, said Kotchakorn, echoing an idea of Thailand’s revered late King Bhumibol Adulyadej to contain flooding in the city.
“No water that falls into the park is wasted,” said Kotchakorn, who is also creating a 36-acre park and green roof for Bangkok’s Thammasat University.
’Softer’ measures crucial
City officials, meanwhile, are building flood barriers and underground tunnels that can carry rainwater faster to the river.
But while infrastructure upgrades are an essential part of tackling urban flood risk, “softer” measures are also crucial, said Diane Archer, a research fellow at the Stockholm Environment Institute in Bangkok.
A key part of that is working with local people so that they can learn to take action themselves, she said.
“This includes highlighting the important role that green roofs and permeability of driveways and yards can play in reducing surface (water) runoff, with added benefits in reducing urban heat island effects,” she said.
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A group of concerned Zimbabweans has started an anti-alcohol and drug campaign, targeting communities in which unemployed young people resort to drinking and using narcotics to alleviate the stress of not having work. Those involved in the campaign say the solution lies largely with improving the country’s moribund economy.
Fewer than three in 10 young Zimbabweans have steady jobs. Many are idle and see no economic opportunity. For some, that leads to problems with alcohol and drugs.
Church leaders, community leaders, and government officials have started warning youths of the impact of drug and alcohol abuse in Zimbabwe and its effect on their physical wellbeing and mental health.
With drug use growing in Zimbabwe, President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government has called for an all-stakeholders meeting on February 1 to come up with possible solutions.
Zimbabwe’s deputy director of Mental Health Services, Dr. Chido Rwafa, says the government cannot deal with the problem of substance abuse alone.
“Alcohol and substance use is a rising problem in all of Africa, and also in Zimbabwe, and it has become one of our top three diagnoses that we are seeing in our mental health unit, so it is becoming a problem. We need a coordinated approach to this problem. It is a multi-sectorial problem. We need a combined effort between government, between non-governmental organizations, with the community itself,” Rwafa said.
Youths are susceptible to peer pressure and can easily gain access to drugs, says Dr. Rwafa. Once hooked on drugs, they also become more likely to engage in criminal activities.
This 20-year-old asked us not to film him when he was smoking cannabis. He says drug use would fall if more people could find employment.
“The best way is just to improve our country economically such that all those people loitering in the streets will find jobs and will be focused. We are going nowhere. Even if you are to look (in the streets), there are some other people damaged (by drugs). Fifty percent of youths in the streets, they can not even work. Their life has been destructed by drugs etc. It is not that they want drug abuse,” Mandizha said.
Roman Catholic Priest Cloudy Maganga is trying to reduce substance abuse by youths by keeping them busy and offering counseling.
“Within our hall, upstairs we are creating what we call a study center for the young people. We will have computers… We have also started what we call the sports for the young people. We have created a volleyball pitch, we have created also a netball pitch for the young people so that when they are free, during their free time, they can be engaged in sports, everyone here. So at least with that we are removing them from being just idle,” Maganga said.
While that may help, when young people have finished playing, they still find themselves unemployed and in the same conditions youths like Takudzwa Mandizha say make them turn to drugs.
A group of concerned Zimbabweans has started an anti-alcohol and drug campaign, targeting communities in which unemployed young people resort to drinking and using narcotics to alleviate the stress of not having work. As Columbus Mavhunga reports from Harare, those involved in the campaign say the solution lies largely with improving the country’s moribund economy.
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The Australian owners of a restaurant in East Timor are hoping to use their passion for the local cuisine to combat malnutrition in the tiny Southeast Asian nation.
East Timor has Asia’s worst rates of child malnutrition, with more than 50 percent of children suffering from stunting – a condition that permanently affects their mental and physical development – according to the United Nations.
But this is not primarily due to a shortage of food – instead, the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF blames a lack of education and knowledge about local foods.
Development worker turned restaurateur Mark Notaras said traditional dishes like batar da’an – a kind of corn stew served at his Agora Food Studio restaurant in the capital Dili – were looked down on as “poor people’s food.”
“If you came to visit Timor, you could eat at 150 restaurants and never find it on a menu,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
Notaras and his wife, Alva Lim, launched the non-profit Timor-Leste Food Innovators Exchange (TLFIX) last year to educate people across the country about cooking with healthy and local ingredients.
They hope to persuade them to supplement diets of white rice and instant noodles – which provide cheap calories but little nutrition – with the indigenous plants that grow there.
“We encourage people to eat a wider array of foods they already have around them in order to improve their nutrition,” said Notaras.
UNICEF already trains mothers in East Timor to provide more nutritious meals, showing them how to incorporate locally grown carrots and leafy greens into the rice that children are traditionally fed.
Lim and Notaras take a more innovative approach.
“We use food storytelling and food innovation to promote better livelihoods, including through nutrition,” said Notaras.
In doing so, they are joining a worldwide movement to return to local produce as populations have shifted away from traditional diets to increasingly consume imported foods that tend to be cheaper but less nutritious.
Organizations like the Rome-based non-profit Bioversity International are trying to reverse that trend by promoting indigenous crops, such as “Mayan spinach” in Central America.
That requires governments to introduce policies that encourage local crops rather than imports, and individual behaviors may need to change too, said Ronnie Vernooy of Bioversity International.
“People may need to invest more time in going to the local market rather than just the supermarket,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by Skype from the Netherlands.
But it may not be that simple.
Rice grown in East Timor can cost three times as much as the low-quality varieties imported from Vietnam, said Notaras, and changing attitudes and market dynamics could take decades.
Lim said she hoped the people of East Timor could push back against the processed food that has flooded the Philippines, where her family originates, and where “the same few bottled and packet sauces” have become ubiquitous.
“There is a lot of diversity in this region and I will be incredibly sad if it disappears,” she said.
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An asteroid-circling spacecraft has captured a cool snapshot of home.
NASA’s Osiris-Rex spacecraft took the picture days before going into orbit around asteroid Bennu on New Year’s Eve.
The tiny asteroid — barely one-third of a mile (500 meters) across — appears as a big bright blob in the long-exposure photo released last week. Seventy million miles (110 million kilometers) away, Earth appears as a white dot, with the moon an even smaller dot but still clearly visible.
Osiris-Rex is the first spacecraft to orbit such a small celestial body, and from such a close distance — about a mile (1,600 meters) out.
Next year, Osiris-Rex will attempt to gather some samples from the carbon-rich asteroid, for return to Earth in 2023.
Osiris-Rex launched from Florida in 2016.
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The U.S. cancer death rate has hit a milestone: It’s been falling for at least 25 years, according to a new report.
Lower smoking rates are translating into fewer deaths. Advances in early detection and treatment also are having a positive impact, experts say.
But it’s not all good news. Obesity-related cancer deaths are rising, and prostate cancer deaths are no longer dropping, said Rebecca Siegel, lead author of the American Cancer Society report published Tuesday.
Cancer also remains the nation’s No. 2 killer. The society predicts there will be more than 1.7 million new cancer cases, and more than 600,000 cancer deaths, in the U.S. this year.
A breakdown of what the report says:
Decline
There’s been a lot of bad news recently regarding U.S. death rates. In 2017, increases were seen in fatalities from seven of the 10 leading causes of death, according to recently released government data. But cancer has been something of a bright spot.
The nation’s cancer death rate was increasing until the early 1990s. It has been dropping since, falling 27 percent between 1991 and 2016, the Cancer Society reported.
Lung cancer is the main reason. Among cancers, it has long killed the most people, especially men. But the lung cancer death rate dropped by nearly 50 percent among men since 1991. It was a delayed effect from a decline in smoking that began in the 1960s, Siegel said.
Prostate cancer
The report has some mixed news about prostate cancer, the second leading cause of cancer death in men.
The prostate cancer death rate fell by half over two decades, but experts have been wondering whether the trend changed after a 2011 decision by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force to stop recommending routine testing of men using the PSA blood test. That decision was prompted by concerns the test was leading to overdiagnosis and overtreatment.
The prostate cancer death rate flattened from 2013 to 2016. So, while the PSA testing may have surfaced cases that didn’t actually need treatment, it may also have prevented some cancer deaths, the report suggests.
Obesity
Of the most common types of cancer in the U.S., all the ones with increasing death rates are linked to obesity, including cancers of the pancreas and uterus.
Another is liver cancer. Liver cancer deaths have been increasing since the 1970s, and initially most of the increase was tied to hepatitis C infections spread among people who abuse drugs. But now obesity accounts for a third of liver cancer deaths, and is more of a factor than hepatitis, Siegel said.
The nation’s growing obesity epidemic was first identified as a problem in the 1990s. It can take decades to see how a risk factor influences cancer rates, “so we may just be seeing the tip of the iceberg in terms of the effect of the obesity epidemic on cancer,” Siegel said.
Disparity
There’s been a decline in the historic racial gap in cancer death rates, but an economic gap is growing — especially when it comes to deaths that could be prevented by early screening and treatment, better eating and less smoking.
In the early 1970s, colon cancer death rates in the poorest counties were 20 percent lower than those in affluent counties; now they’re 30 percent higher. Cervical cancer deaths are twice as high for women in poor counties now, compared with women in affluent counties. And lung and liver cancer death rates are 40 percent higher for men in poor counties.
Dr. Darrell Gray, deputy director of Ohio State University’s Center for Cancer Health Equity, called the findings “important but not surprising.”
“We’ve known for some time that race is a surrogate” for other factors, like poverty and difficulty getting to — or paying for — doctor’s appointments, he said.
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In rural Malawi, families send girls as young as 12 years old for “initiation,” a traditional, cultural practice that marks a child’s entry into adulthood. But child rights campaigners say the ritual entices young girls into early sex, marriage, and teenage pregnancy — forcing many to drop out of school. One local organization is seeking to change this by teaching initiation counselors to give girls age-appropriate information.
Madalitso Makosa was 13 years old when she underwent a traditional, Malawian initiation ritual to become an adult.
She says after the initiation ceremony, the counselors advised her to perform a Kusasa Fumbi or “removing the dust” ritual with a man of my choice. She chose to sleep with her former boyfriend but, unfortunately, became pregnant.
“Removing the dust” refers to a girl losing her virginity, often without protection, to become an adult. Those who become teenage mothers pay the price for this tradition.
Makosa says when she discovered she was pregnant, she was devastated because she had to drop out of school. She is now struggling to get support to take care of her baby. She wished she had continued with her education.”
During the initiation, counselors show how they prepare girls for marriage and for sex.
Agnes Matemba, is an initiation counselor.
She says she gives girls these lessons so that they should keep their man and prevent him from going out to look for another woman. Because, if he goes out and finds excitement in other women, he is likely to dump her.
Child rights campaigners say the initiation ritual fuels Malawi’s high rate of child marriage. Half the girls here marry before age 18.
Malawian group Youthnet and Counselling, YONECO, wants to keep girls in school with a more age-appropriate initiation ritual.
MacBain Mkandawire is YONECO’s executive director.
“This is a traditional cultural thing that people believe in, and it will be very difficult to just say let us end initiation ceremonies,” Mkandawire said. “But what we are saying is that can we package the curriculum in such way the young people are accessing the correct curriculum at the correct time?”
YONECO is working with initiation counselors and traditional leaders to tone down Malawi’s initiations. Already, some areas are banning the practice of encouraging sex after the ceremony.
Aidah Deleza is also known as Senior Chief Chikumbu.
“We say no, no, no,” Chikumbu said. “This is why we have a lot of girls drop out from school, that is why the population has just shot so high just because of that, just because a lot of girls now they have got babies, most of them they are not in marriage.”
To further discourage teenage pregnancy, traditional leaders like Chikumbu are dividing girls’ initiation rituals into two camps.
One is a simple ceremony for teenage girls like Makosa, while the other provides some sex education for older girls who are preparing to marry.
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The palm oil industry is deploying tactics similar to those of the alcohol and tobacco industries to influence research into the health effects of its product, a study published by the World Health Organization said on Tuesday.
Evidence of the health impact of palm oil is mixed, with some studies linking consumption to several ailments, including increased risk of death from heart disease caused by narrowing arteries, the report said.
The study, “The palm oil industry and non-communicable diseases,” called for more research and tighter regulation of the $60 billion industry, and said researchers should be wary of being influenced by lobbyists.
“The relationship between the palm oil and processed food industries, and the tactics they employ, resembles practices adopted by the tobacco and alcohol industries. However, the palm oil industry receives comparatively little scrutiny,” it said.
Palm oil plantations, mainly in Malaysia and Indonesia, cover an area roughly the size of New Zealand, and demand is expected to grow as more countries ban trans fats, which the WHO wants banned globally by 2023.
Trans fats are prepared in an industrial process that makes liquid oils solid at room temperature, and are now widely recognized as bad for health.
Palm oil is naturally more solid than most other vegetable oils, and the demise of trans fats will leave it as an easy choice for ultra-processed foods, said the study, co-authored by researchers at the U.N. children’s fund UNICEF, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Britain’s University of Exeter.
The study said labeling is often unclear, and palm oil can be listed under any one of more than 200 alternative names, turning up frequently in foods such as biscuits and chocolate spread. “Consumers may be unaware of what they are eating or its safety,” the study said.
The authors of the study, published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, said they found nine pieces of research showing overwhelmingly positive health associations, but four of them were authored by the Malaysian Palm Oil Board.
“The contested nature of the evidence suggests the need for independent, comprehensive studies of the health impact of palm oil consumption,” they wrote.
The study also pointed to the health effect of the production of palm oil in countries where it is grown, with slash-and-burn agriculture causing air pollution and haze linked to premature deaths, respiratory illness and cardiovascular diseases.
“Of major concern is the effect of exposure to particulate matter on fetal, infant and child mortality, as well as children’s cognitive, educational and economic attainment.”
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After three years of decline, U.S. carbon emissions shot up last year, based on early estimates from an independent research group. The Rhodium Group routinely monitors carbon emissions and their preliminary estimates suggest U.S. output was up 3.4 percent in 2018.
This is the largest annual increase since 2010, when the nation was bouncing back from a financial crisis known as Great Recession.
The research also suggests that despite the Trump administration’s efforts to revive the coal industry, it continues to decline in the face of cheap and plentiful natural gas.
Bad news for coal
According to the Rhodium report, coal-fired plants generating 11.2 gigawatts of power had closed by October of last year, with more scheduled for closure over the following months. While the numbers are still preliminary, if they pan out, that would make 2018 the biggest coal plant closure year on record.
Far and away, natural gas is now the energy of choice in the U.S. with an increase of 166 million kilowatts per hour through October.
U.S. power consumption – and carbon emissions – increased in 2018. But the transportation sector of the economy contributed the most to the nation’s record emissions. The good news is that gasoline demand is down modestly, as the hybrid and electric car industry have begun to make a small dent in the demand for gasoline. But increases in the demand for diesel and jet fuel still made transportation the biggest source of carbon emissions throughout the U.S.
Another big source of emissions that often doesn’t get noticed, according to the report, is in the building sector of the economy. Emissions from buildings and homes was way up, due in part to an exceptionally cold winter in parts of the U.S. last year.
The Paris question
2018 is an anomaly because each year, since 2015, U.S. carbon emissions had been decreasing, if modestly, as the nation worked to reach its commitments to the Paris Climate Agreement. U.S emissions declined by 2.7 percent in 2015, 1.7 percent in 2016, and 0.8 percent in 2017. But even with those reductions, the U.S. was already off track to meet reductions agreed to by the Obama administration.
The U.S. joined almost 200 other countries to sign the agreement in 2015. Under the deal, the U.S. committed to cutting its carbon emissions by at least 26 percent from 2005 levels by 2025.
But the Trump administration announced its intention to pull the U.S. out of the deal this year, and will formally exit the global compact in 2020.