Marijuana’s main mind-altering ingredient was detected in nursing mothers’ breast milk in a small study that comes amid evidence that more U.S. women are using pot during pregnancy and afterward.

Experts say the ingredient, THC, has chemical properties that could allow it to disrupt brain development and potentially cause harm, although solid evidence of that is lacking.

 

The new study involved 50 nursing mothers who were using pot and provided breast milk samples to researchers at the University of California, San Diego. Lab testing found small amounts of THC, the psychoactive chemical that causes marijuana’s “high,” in 34 of 54 samples up to six days after they were provided. Another form of THC and cannabidiol, a pot chemical touted by some as a health aid, were detected in five samples.

 

The study authors said “it is reasonable to speculate” that exposing infants to THC or cannabidiol “could influence normal brain development,” depending on dose and timing.

 

The results echo findings in case reports from years ago, when pot was less potent than what’s available today, said study co-author Christina Chambers, a pediatrics professor. It’s not known if the amounts detected pose any risk, but she said her research team is studying children whose moms’ were involved to try to answer that question.

 

Two small studies from the 1980s had conflicting results on whether pot use affects breastfed infants. One found no evidence of growth delays; the other found slight developmental delays in breastfed infants, but their mothers had used pot during pregnancy too.

 

Most pediatricians encourage breastfeeding and its health benefits for infants, but “they’re stuck with a dilemma” with infants whose mothers use pot, Chambers said.

 

A new American Academy of Pediatrics report recommending against pot use while pregnant or nursing acknowledges that challenge.

 

“We still support women breastfeeding even if using marijuana but would encourage them to cut down and quit,” said Dr. Seth Ammerman, a report co-author and Stanford University pediatrics professor.

 

“In counseling patients about this, it’s important to be nonjudgmental but to educate patients about the potential risks and benefits,” Ammerman said, to ensure “a healthy outcome for themselves and their baby.”

 

The study and report were published Monday in the journal Pediatrics .

 

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has similar advice.

 

The academy report says its advice is based on theoretical risks to developing brains, but it acknowledges conflicting evidence and a dearth of research. Some studies have linked pot use during pregnancy with lower birth weights or preterm birth, along with developmental delays and learning difficulties in older children. But additional factors including women’s use of other drugs during pregnancy complicated the results, the report says.

 

Marijuana is legal for recreational use in nine states and Washington, D.C., and for medical use in 31 states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

 

As more states legalize marijuana, its use is increasing along with the “false impression” that it is safe, the academy’s report says. Ammerman said caution makes sense, given the uncertainties.

 

According to U.S. government data, about 1 in 20 women report using marijuana during pregnancy. Estimates for use among breastfeeding mothers vary, but a study in Colorado, where recreational marijuana is legal, put the number at almost 20 percent among women in a government supplemental food program.

 

The report, study and a journal editorial all said more research is needed.

 

Last year, a federal advisory panel said lack of scientific information about marijuana poses a public health risk.

 

Research has been hampered by federal government restrictions based on its view that marijuana is an illegal drug.

 

That has contributed to a stigma and shaded doctors’ views, said Keira Sumimoto, an Irvine, California, mother who used marijuana briefly for medical reasons while pregnant and breastfeeding. She said smoking a joint daily helped her gain weight when she was sick before learning she was pregnant, and eased childbirth-related pain, but that she quit because of backlash from marijuana opponents.

 

She said her daughter, now 8 months old, is healthy and advanced for her age.

 

Sumimoto runs @cannabisandmotherhood , an Instagram account that she says aims to present truthful information about marijuana so women can make their own choices.

 

She said she agrees with advice to be cautious, but that the academy’s stance is “is just a little too much.”

 

“The fear is taking over and the need and want to understand this plant is being ignored by the stigma,” Sumimoto said.

 

 

 

 
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It’s a good idea for people to get an annual physical … and it’s important for animals, too. The London Zoo hosted its annual weigh-in for thousands of its animals recently, enticing the creatures with food to get their measurements. The documentation process is an extensive and time-consuming exercise for the zoo keepers, but a crucial one, say zoo officials. VOA’s Julie Taboh has more.
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Brazil’s health officials say more than 4 million children still need to be vaccinated against measles.

More than 1,380 people have been infected in an outbreak linked to cases imported from Venezuela.

To stop the disease’s spread, Brazil’s Health Ministry launched a campaign this month to vaccinate all children between 1 and 5 — regardless of their vaccination history. It said Friday that 4.1 million children still had not been vaccinated as the campaign enters its final week.

Among the places with the lowest vaccination rates is Roraima, one of two border states with Venezuela where cases are concentrated.

Health services in the neighboring country have collapsed amid economic and political turmoil, which has caused more than 1 million people to flee.

Tens of thousands have migrated to Brazil.
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A doctor has become the first probable Ebola case in one of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’s “high insecurity zones” which are dogged by militia violence and hard to access, a scenario “we have all been dreading,” the WHO said on Friday.

Since the outbreak erupted on August 1, 103 confirmed and probable cases of Ebola have been identified in North Kivu and Ituri provinces, including 63 deaths, the health ministry said in an overnight update.

The doctor living in Oicha town in North Kivu has been re-hospitalised with Ebola symptoms after his wife was confirmed as having the disease when she traveled to the nearby city of Beni, said Dr. Peter Salama, the World Health Organization’s head of emergency operations.

Oicha is almost entirely surrounded by ADF Ugandan Islamist militia, there are “extremely serious security concerns,” he said. Aid workers, priests and government officials are held hostage in the area, he said.

The doctor’s initial test for Ebola — which causes vomiting, fever and diarrhea — had been negative, but fresh results are awaited, Salama told Reuters.

So far 97 of the doctor’s contacts who may have been exposed to the virus have been identified, and vaccination has begun in the town, he added.

“So for the first time really we have a confirmed case and contacts in an area of very high insecurity. It really was the problem we were anticipating and the problem at same time that we were dreading,” Salama told a news briefing.

WHO and health experts reached Oicha with armed escort by MONUSCO troops this week, he said, adding: “We know from that incident now in Oicha we are going to have to operate in some very complex environments due to security and access concerns.”

In a further worrying development, angry youth burned down a health center in another village, where vaccinations were under way, after learning of a death from Ebola, Salama said.

More than 2,900 people have been vaccinated against Ebola since the outbreak began, he said.

“We are at quite a pivotal moment in this outbreak in terms of the evolution of the outbreak epidemiologically and in terms of the response,” he said.
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Thirty-six million people currently live with AIDS, a disease that claimed the lives of nearly 1 million people last year. Experts predict that by 2030, 100 million people will have been infected with the HIV virus.

Despite the alarming numbers, there have been great strides in treatment. HIV is no longer a death sentence, and researchers say people receiving treatment for HIV are able to live normal lives and do not pose a risk to others when they are being treated proactively.

But success carries a price: complacency. Funding for AIDS research and treatment has declined, and in some places, so has government interest.

“When we talk to ministers of finance, they always say to me, ‘I thought HIV was over because I don’t see anybody dying,’” said Dr. Deborah Birx, a U.S. Global AIDS coordinator who oversees the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

J. Stephen Morrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said, “We’re not reaching goals.” He added, “There’s going to be a struggle to hold ground. … There’s a widening deficit of political will and financial capacity that we face some really daunting challenges in prevention.”

Dr. Chris Beyrer, with Johns Hopkins Medicine, predicted that things will get worse if governments and civilians continue their complacency. 

“We are not done with AIDS,” he said. “It is much too early to declare victory, and the risks of a resurgent epidemic are real.”

Birx, Morrison and Beyrer discussed the challenges in ending AIDS at a program in Washington to evaluate the messages from this year’s International AIDS Conference in Amsterdam.

New infections are down from 3.4 million a year, but they’re stuck at 1.8 million per year. And there are 17 million people living with HIV who cannot be reached. They are in high risk groups: young women, particularly young African women; men who have sex with men; IV drug users; those in prisons and other closed settings; sex workers and their clients; and transgender people.

“Those key populations and young women account for over 50 percent of new infections, and they are really hard to reach,” Morrison said.

Though it’s relatively easy to prevent HIV transmission during childbirth, Beyrer said about 30 percent of all infants born with HIV worldwide are born in Nigeria.

​In the U.S., HIV is increasingly an infection in communities with high rates of poverty and in black and Hispanic populations.

The National Institutes of Health announced Aug. 20 that getting these groups into care is critical to ending the HIV epidemic in the U.S. NIH also announced an international program to reduce the stigma around the virus so more people with the disease can seek treatment.

Experts agree it is possible to end the HIV pandemic, even without a vaccine. But to do this, governments and communities need to be involved, funding needs to be continued, and everyone with HIV needs to be treated.
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Since the 1990s, annual numbers of U.S. coal miners with new, confirmed cases of an advanced form of so-called black lung disease known as progressive massive fibrosis have been steadily rising, according to a new study.

The resurgence is particularly strong among central Appalachian miners in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia, the study authors note.

“It’s an entirely preventable disease, and every case is an important representation of a failure to prevent this disease,” said lead study author Kirsten Almberg of the University of Illinois at Chicago and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in Morgantown, West Virginia.

Progressive massive fibrosis is the most severe form of pneumoconiosis, which is also known as black lung disease and is caused by overexposure to coal mine dust. The symptoms are debilitating and can lead to respiratory distress.

“Many people think black lung is a relic of the past,” she told Reuters Health in a phone interview. “But it shouldn’t fade from our attention.”

Almberg and colleagues looked at the number of progressive massive fibrosis cases among former U.S. coal miners applying for Federal Black Lung Program benefits between 1970 and 2016.Miners can apply for financial help and medical coverage if facing disabling lung impairment, and claims are accepted when medical tests and imaging verify the presence of disabling pulmonary impairment.

Progressive massive fibrosis is “by definition” considered totally disabling, the authors note in the Annals of the American Thoracic Society.

Among 314,000 miners who applied for benefits during the 46-year period, the research team found 4,679 cases of confirmed progressive massive fibrosis, with 2,474 of these representing claims filed since 1996.

The yearly number of cases fell from 404 in 1978 to 18 in 1988 but then began increasing each year, with 383 confirmed cases in 2014, the study found. At the same time, employment has declined from 250,000 miners in 1979 to 81,000 in 2016, the authors note.

“It’s pretty staggering that more than half of the cases were in the more recent period since 1996,” Almberg said. “These are our first snapshots of how big this problem really is.”

The increase has most dramatically impacted the Appalachian region. About 84 percent of miners with confirmed cases of progressive massive fibrosis last mined in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia, although only 62 percent of claims originated in these states.

“Put simply, we still do not know exactly why severe disease has increased so much among miners in central Appalachia or when this trend may reverse,” said Emily Sarver, a mining and minerals engineer at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, who wasn’t involved in the study.

Future research should look at the different factors that may affect this ongoing increase in diagnoses, such as changes in the types of dust in mining environments, said Sarver, who works with mine partners to sample dust in active operations and characterize what’s in it and the size of particles.

“This is a real and very complex problem. Unlike safety issues, which are oftentimes apparent or can be identified and mitigated quickly, the exposure-response time with many health issues is quite long,” she said. “If I am exposed to hazardous dust today, for example, it may not impact my lungs for a decade or more, and I may experience a different outcome than another person exposed to the same dust.”

Similarly, Almberg and study co-author Robert Cohen of NIOSH and National Jewish Health and University of Colorado in Denver are working with mining engineers and pathologists to study coal mine dust in lung tissue samples to understand what causes progressive massive fibrosis to develop.

They’re comparing lung tissue samples from current cases to samples collected from autopsies of former miners, and want to understand whether new mining techniques may create smaller dust particles that drive the disease deeper into the lungs or whether more toxic carbon or coal dust is being expelled from mines.

“Like any person, you should expect to be able to work for a full career and leave the workforce and still have your health and life ahead of you,” Almberg said. “Coal miners aren’t the only ones exposed to hazardous materials on the job, and we should be able to catch this early and prevent it from progressing to the severe stages of the disease.”
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Vice President Mike Pence is in Houston, Texas, to reaffirm the Trump administration’s plans to establish an American Space Force by 2020, return Americans to the moon, and set its sight on Mars and beyond.

During a speech Thursday at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Pence said that recent Pentagon reports have shown that China is “aggressively weaponizing space” and that Russia is developing weapons to “counter America’s space capabilities.”

Pence said the Department of Defense is moving forward to “strengthen American security in space” and that the administration will work with Congress to secure funding and authorization to establish Space Force as a new and separate branch of the armed forces.

Pence also highlighted efforts to move the Lunar Orbital Platform, formerly known as the Deep Space Gateway, from proposal phase to production. NASA, the main U.S. agency for space exploration, and several of its partners, have been developing plans for this lunar-orbit space station that would be used as a staging point for lunar exploration and would have several gateway-to-space features, including a propulsion system, a habitat for the crew, and docking capability.

In its 2019 budget, NASA has requested $504 million in funding for this project, which has yet to be approved by Congress.

There was little new detail in Pence’s speech other than reiterating the administration’s vision for “American dominance in space.” Space Force has been mentioned by Pence on several occasions, and a theme that President Donald Trump often returns to, including during his rally in Charleston, West Virginia, on Tuesday.

Trump first announced the creation of Space Force at the White House in June. He pledged to reclaim U.S. leadership in space, framing it as a national security issue, and saying he does not want “China and Russia and other countries leading us.”

Trump’s Space Force has triggered debate in military space exploration, as well as legal circles, including whether it may violate international law. The U.S. is a signatory and ratifier of the United Nations Outer Space Treaty of 1967.

The treaty prevents any nation from declaring sovereignty over space or heavenly bodies, and prohibits space-faring countries from blocking other nations from exploring space. There are further restrictions over military presence on heavenly bodies such as the moon, which according to the treaty “shall be used exclusively for peaceful purposes.”

Last December, Trump signed Space Policy Directive 1, a national space policy directing a government-private partnership with the goal of returning Americans to the moon, followed by missions to Mars and beyond.

The policy calls for the NASA administrator to “lead an innovative and sustainable program of exploration with commercial and international partners to enable human expansion across the solar system and to bring back to Earth new knowledge and opportunities.”

Pence has been the leading spokesperson for the U.S. space program, delivering remarks about the country’s space ambitions on behalf of the president.
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Russian scientists have found the carcass of an ancient foal perfectly preserved in the Siberian permafrost.

The fossil discovered in the region of Yakutia has its skin, hair, hooves and tail preserved. Yakutia is also famous having wooly mammoth fossils found in the permafrost.  

Scientists from Russia’s Northeast Federal University who presented the discovery Thursday said the foal is estimated to be 30,000 to 40,000 years old. They believe it was about two months old when it died.

Semyon Grigoryev, head of the Mammoth Museum in the regional capital of Yakutsk, was surprised to see the perfect state of the find. He noted it’s the best-preserved ancient foal found to date.

The foal was discovered in the Batagaika crater, a huge 100-meter (328-foot) deep depression in the East Siberian taiga.
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For the millions of sun seekers who head to Thailand’s resort island of Phuket each year in search of stunning beaches and clear waters, cutting down on waste may not be a top priority.

But the island’s hotel association is hoping to change that with a series of initiatives aimed at reducing the use of plastic, tackling the garbage that washes up on its shores, and educating staff, local communities and tourists alike.

“Hotels unchecked are huge consumers and users of single-use plastics,” said Anthony Lark, president of the Phuket Hotels Association and managing director of the Trisara resort.

“Every resort in Southeast Asia has a plastic problem. Until we all make a change, it’s going to get worse and worse,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Established in 2016 and with about 70 members – including all Phuket’s five-star hotels – the association has put tackling environmental issues high on its to-do list.

Last year the group surveyed members’ plastics use and then began looking at ways to shrink their plastics footprint.

As part of this, three months ago the association’s hotels committed to phase out, or put plans in place to stop using plastic water bottles and plastic drinking straws by 2019.

About five years ago, Lark’s own resort with about 40 villas used to dump into landfill about 250,000 plastic water bottles annually. It has now switched to reusable glass bottles.

The hotel association also teamed up with the documentary makers of “A Plastic Ocean”, and now show an edited version with Thai subtitles for staff training.

Meanwhile hotel employees and local school children take part in regular beach clean-ups.

“The association is involved in good and inclusive community-based action, rather than just hotel general managers getting together for a drink,” Lark said.

Creator and Victims

Phuket, like Bali in Indonesia and Boracay in the Philippines, has become a top holiday destination in Southeast Asia – and faces similar challenges.

Of a similar size to Singapore and at the geographical heart of Southeast Asia, Phuket is easily accessible to tourists from China, India, Malaysia and Australia.

With its white sandy beaches and infamous nightlife, Phuket attracts about 10 million visitors each year, media reports say, helping make the Thai tourism industry one of the few bright spots in an otherwise lackluster economy.

Popular with holiday makers and retirees, Phuket – like many other Southeast Asian resorts – must contend with traffic congestion, poor water management and patchy waste collection services.

Despite these persistent problems, hotels in the region need to follow Phuket’s lead and step up action to cut their dependence on plastics, said Susan Ruffo, a managing director at the U.S.-based non-profit group Ocean Conservancy.

Worldwide, between 8 million and 15 million tons of plastic are dumped in the ocean every year, killing marine life and entering the human food chain, UN Environment says.

Five Asian countries – China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand – account for up to 60 percent of plastic waste leaking into the seas, an Ocean Conservancy study found.

“As both creators and ‘victims’ of waste, the hotel industry has a lot to gain by making efforts to control their own waste and helping their guests do the same,” Ruffo said.

“We are seeing more and more resorts and chains start to take action, but there is a lot more to be done, particularly in the area of ensuring that hotel waste is properly collected and recycled,” she added.

Changing Minds, Cutting Costs

Data on how much plastic is used by hotels and the hospitality industry is hard to find. But packaging accounts for up to 40 percent of an establishment’s waste stream, according to a 2011 study by The Travel Foundation, a U.K.-based charity.

Water bottles, shampoo bottles, toothbrushes and even food delivered by room service all tend to use throw-away plastics.

In the past, the hospitality industry has looked at how to use less water and energy, said Von Hernandez, global coordinator at the “Break Free From Plastic” movement in Manila.

Now hotels are turning their attention to single-use plastics amid growing public awareness about damage to oceans.

“A lot of hotels are doing good work around plastics,” adopting measures to eliminate or shrink their footprint, said Hernandez.

But hotels in Southeast Asia often have to contend with poor waste management and crumbling infrastructure.

“I’ve seen resorts in Bali that pay staff to rake the beach every morning to get rid of plastic, but then they either dig a hole, and bury it or burn it on the beach,” said Ruffo. “Those are not effective solutions, and can lead to other issues.”

Hotels should look at providing reusable water containers and refill stations, giving guests metal or bamboo drinking straws and bamboo toothbrushes, and replacing single-use soap and shampoo containers with refillable dispensers, experts said.

“Over time, this could actually lower their operational costs – it could give them savings,” said Hernandez. “It could help change mindsets of people, so that when they go back to their usual lives, they have a little bit of education.”

Back in Phuket, the hotel association is exploring ways to cut plastic waste further, and will host its first regional forum on environmental awareness next month.

The hope is that what the group has learned over the last two years can be implemented at other Southeast Asian resorts and across the wider community.

“If the 20,000 staff in our hotels go home and educate mum and dad about recycling or reusing, it’s going to make a big difference,” said Lark.
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NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine has a vision for renewed and “sustainable” human exploration of the moon, and he cites the existence of water on the lunar surface as a key to chances for success.

“We know that there’s hundreds of billions of tons of water ice on the surface of the moon,” Bridenstine said in a Reuters TV interview in Washington on Tuesday, a day after NASA unveiled its analysis of data collected from lunar orbit by a spacecraft from India.

The findings, published on Monday, mark the first time scientists have confirmed by direct observation the presence of water on the moon’s surface – in hundreds of patches of ice deposited in the darkest and coldest reaches of its polar regions.

The discovery holds tantalizing implications for efforts to return humans to the moon for the first time in half a century.

The presence of water offers a potentially valuable resource not only for drinking but for producing more rocket fuel and oxygen to breathe.

Bridenstine, a former U.S. Navy fighter pilot and Oklahoma congressman tapped by President Donald Trump in April as NASA chief, spoke about “hundreds of billions of tons” of water ice that he said were now known to be available on the lunar surface.

But much remains to be learned.

NASA lunar scientist Sarah Noble told Reuters separately by phone that it is still unknown much ice is actually present on the moon and how easy it would be to extract in sufficient quantities to be of practical use.

“We have lots of models that give us different answers. We can’t know how much water there is,” she said, adding that it will ultimately take surface exploration by robotic landers or rovers, in more than one place, to find out.

Most of the newly confirmed frozen water is concentrated in the shadows of craters at both poles, where the temperature never rises higher than minus-250 degrees Fahrenheit.

Making Moon Exploration Sustainable

Although the moon was long believed to be entirely dry or nearly devoid of moisture, scientists have found increasing evidence in recent years that water exists there.

A NASA rocket sent crashing into a permanently shadowed lunar crater near the moon’s south pole in 2009 kicked up a plume of material from beneath the surface that included water.

A study published the following year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that water is likely widespread within the moon’s rocky interior, in concentrations ranging from 64 parts per billion to five parts per million.

Bridenstine spoke to Reuters about making the next generation of lunar exploration a “sustainable enterprise,” using rockets and other space vehicles that could be used again and again.

“So we want tugs that go from Earth orbit to lunar orbit to be reusable. We want a space station around the moon to be there for a very long period of time, and we want landers that go back and forth between the space station around the moon and the surface of the moon,” Bridenstine said.

NASA’s previous program of human moon exploration ended with the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.

Trump last December announced a goal of sending American astronauts back to the moon, with the ultimate goal of establishing “a foundation for an eventual mission to Mars.”

The Trump administration’s $19.9 billion budget proposal for NASA for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 includes $10.5 billion for human space exploration.

The budget supports development of NASA’s new Space Launch System rocket and the Orion spacecraft designed to carry a crew into space. The administration envisioned a SLS/Orion test flight around the moon without a crew in 2020, followed by a fly-around mission with a crew in 2023.

As part of the budget proposal, NASA also is planning to build the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway – a space station in moon orbit – in the 2020s. NASA said the power and propulsion unit, its initial component, is targeted to launch in 2022.

In May, NASA canceled a lunar rover that was under development, a project envisioned as the first mission to conduct mining somewhere other than Earth.
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He played more than 300 games in his professional career, but NHL goalie Clint Malarchuk is best remembered for only one – a game that almost killed him. It happened on March 22, 1989, in a game against the St. Louis Blues. Malarchuk, on goal, was sliced on the neck by another player’s errant skate, severing his jugular vein. He survived, just as he later survived depression and a suicide attempt. He spoke with VOA’s Iuliia Iarmolenko. Faith Lapidus narrates her report.
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In his first 12 years working as a vet in Bangladesh, Bikash Chandra Saha routinely prescribed antibiotics. Then he learned of the devastating impact of antimicrobial resistance on human health — and it revolutionized his treatment choices.

The growing resistance of deadly diseases to antimicrobial drugs such as antibiotics is seen as one of the biggest threats to human health, but awareness of the dangers of overuse remains low, particularly in developing countries.

Now the United Nations is educating workers on the front lines of the battle against this global scourge — among them Saha, who works for one of Bangladesh’s biggest poultry companies.

“It definitely changed my attitude and my antibiotic selection,” Saha, who attended a recent training course, told Reuters by phone.

“Before, my focus was on what is the best option [for the animal]. After the training, I know the threat of antimicrobial resistance, even for my family, for my children. This is a new thing.”

Lethal bacteria are showing more and more resistance to antimicrobials, and a 2016 report found drug-resistant infections could kill 10 million people a year by 2050.

Livestock is a large part of the problem — especially in Asia, where rising incomes have led to a growth in the consumption of fish and meat.

Most countries require prescriptions for antibiotics in humans, but less than half limit their use to promote growth in agriculture, according to a report published last month.

Phone app

Saha said colistin, once a livestock-specific antibiotic but now a drug of last resort that can save human lives when others have failed, was commonly used on animals in Bangladesh but since the training he and the other vets were more careful about using it.

The course was run by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which has trained nearly 150 vets and doctors in Bangladesh since February on the globally accepted guidelines for antibiotic use.

Those guidelines are now available as mobile phone app — one of a number of innovative ways in which international organizations are seeking to educate people working with antimicrobial drugs about the dangers of overuse.

Thailand, where antimicrobial resistance causes 19,000 additional deaths a year, is working on an online dictionary in English, Thai, Vietnamese, Lao and Burmese to cut through the jargon surrounding the issue.

“In the Mekong region, people don’t clearly understand the difference between bacteria and virus,” said Direk Limmathurotsakul, assistant professor at Bangkok’s Mahidol University, who is leading the project.

“People still commonly use antibiotics for common cold, which is caused by virus,” he added. “Even the word antibiotic can be called different ways. In Thailand, sometimes it is called anti-inflammatory or antiseptic drug.”

Blanket bans

Simply banning antibiotics would not work, experts say, with farmers unlikely to comply.

Instead, they hope improved knowledge of drugs will help reduce antimicrobial use on Asian farms — seen as the low-hanging fruit because it is currently so high.

In Vietnam, 120 poultry farmers are to receive training on how to prevent and control diseases as well as free veterinary advice as part of a pilot project aimed at reducing drug use.

“We’re improving the knowledge base of farmers and vets rather than a ban on antibiotics, which would be unlikely to be complied with,” said Juan Carrique-Mas, the project’s principal investigator.

“The baseline shows very high level of usage, so I think it would be relatively easy to reduce it by 30 to 50 percent with even better productivity and health,” added Carrique-Mas, of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Ho Chi Minh City.

Data on antibiotic use on farms in the region remains sparse, but is starting to be collected, said Suzanne Eckford, a British specialist who works with the FAO.

Eckford advocated against blanket bans on antibiotics — not least because they could have unintended consequences on food production.

“You can’t just say, ‘don’t do something,'” she said. “You have to say, ‘this is what you need to do instead and you’ll be still able to have a productive, economically viable system.'”
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Israel on Tuesday outlawed the import and sale of e-cigarettes made by Silicon Valley startup Juul Labs, citing public health concerns given their nicotine content.

A statement by Israel’s Health Ministry said the Juul device was banned because it contains nicotine at a concentration higher than 20 milligrams per milliliter and poses “a grave risk to public health.”

Since launching in 2015, the flash drive-sized vaping device has transformed the market in the United States, where it now accounts for nearly 70 percent of tracked e-cigarette sales. The company is valued at $15 billion based on its most recent funding round, according to venture capital database Pitchbook.

In a statement Tuesday, Juul Labs Inc said it was “incredibly disappointed” with what it called a “misguided” decision by the Israeli government. The San Francisco company said it planned to appeal the ban, adding that its devices provide smokers “a true alternative to combustible cigarettes.”

The Israeli move was consistent with similar restrictions in Europe, the ministry’s statement said.

The ban, which goes into effect in 15 days, was signed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who also holds the health portfolio.

Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported in May that Juul e-cigarettes were already available for purchase at 30 locations around the country.

Juul says it targets adult smokers, but it has faced scrutiny over the popularity of its products with teenagers.

In April, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration launched a crackdown on the sale of e-cigarettes and tobacco products to minors, particularly those developed by Juul Labs.
…

Smoke from wildfires clogged the sky across the U.S. West, blotting out mountains and city skylines from Oregon to Colorado, delaying flights and forcing authorities to tell even healthy adults in the Seattle area to stay indoors.

 

As large cities dealt with unhealthy air for a second summer in a row, experts warned that it could become more common as the American West faces larger and more destructive wildfires because of heat and drought blamed on climate change. Officials also must prioritize resources during the longer firefighting season, so some blazes may be allowed to burn in unpopulated areas.

 

Seattle’s Space Needle was swathed in haze, and it was impossible to see nearby mountains. Portland, Oregon, residents who were up early saw a blood-red sun shrouded in smoke and huffed their way through another day of polluted air. Portland Public Schools suspended all outdoor sports practices.

 

Thick smoke in Denver blocked the view of some of Colorado’s famous mountains and prompted an air quality health advisory for the northeastern quarter of the state.

The smoky pollution, even in Idaho and Colorado, came from wildfires in British Columbia and the Northwest’s Cascade Mountains, clouding a season that many spend outdoors.

 

Portland resident Zach Simon supervised a group of children in a summer biking camp who paused at a huge water fountain by the Willamette River, where gray, smoky haze obscured a view of Mount Hood.

 

Simon said he won’t let the kids ride as far or take part in as many running games like tag while the air quality is bad.

 

“I went biking yesterday, and I really felt it in my lungs, and I was really headachy and like, lethargic,” Simon said Monday. “Today, biking, you can see the whole city in haze and you can’t see the skyline.”

 

One of Colin Shor’s favorite things about working in the Denver area is the view of the high peaks to the west. But that was all but gone Monday.

 

“Not being able to see the mountains is kind of disappointing, kind of sad,” he said.

 

Forest fires are common, but typical Seattle-area weather pushes it out of the way quickly. The latest round of prolonged smoke happened as hot temperatures and high pressure collided, said Andrew Wineke, a spokesman for the state Ecology Department’s air quality program.

It’s a rare occurrence that also happened last year, raising concerns for many locals that it may become normal during wildfire season. Wineke said climate change is expected to contribute to many more fires.

 

“The trend is clear. You see the number of forest fires increasing, and so there’s going to be wildfires,” Wineke said. “There’s going to be smoke. It’s going to be somewhere.”

 

The Federal Aviation Administration said airplanes bound for the Sea-Tac International Airport, Seattle’s main airport, may be delayed because of low visibility.

In Spokane, air quality slipped into the “hazardous” range. Thick haze hung over Washington’s second-largest city, forcing vehicles to turn on their headlights during the morning commute.

 

The air quality was so bad that everyone, regardless of physical condition or age, will likely be affected, according to the Spokane Regional Clean Air Agency.

 

In California, wind blew smoke from several wildfires into the San Francisco Bay Area, where haze led authorities to issue an air quality advisory through Tuesday. They suggested people avoid driving to limit additional pollutants in the air and advised those with health problems to reduce time outdoors.

 

Health officials say signs of smoke-related health symptoms include coughing, scratchy throat, irritated sinuses, headaches, stinging eyes and runny nose. Those with heart disease may experience chest pain, irregular heartbeats, shortness of breath and fatigue.

 

Patients at Denver’s National Jewish Health, a respiratory hospital, were reporting worsening symptoms, hospital spokesman Adam Dormuth said.

 

In Portland, six tourists from Lincoln, Nebraska, posed for a photo in front of the Willamette River with the usual Mount Hood backdrop shrouded in haze. The group of siblings and friends rented an RV and drove in to visit a sister who recently moved to the area.

 

“We are disappointed that we can’t see the mountains and the whole city, because our relatives live here and tell us how pretty it is, and we’re missing it,” Bev Harris said. “We’re from tornado alley, and we don’t have wildfires. It’s a different experience.”
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Scorching summer heat waves and downpours are set to become more extreme in the northern hemisphere as global warming makes weather patterns linger longer in the same place, scientists said Monday.

They said there was a risk of “extreme extremes” in North America, Europe and parts of Asia because man-made greenhouse gas emissions seemed to be disrupting high-altitude winds that blow eastward in vast, looping “planetary waves.”

“Summer weather is likely to become more persistent — more prolonged hot dry periods, possibly also more prolonged rainy periods,” said Dim Coumou, lead author of the study at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

“Both can lead to extremes” such as heat, drought, wildfires or flooding, he told Reuters of the findings in the journal Nature Communications, based on a review of existing scientific literature.

Many parts of the northern hemisphere have experienced baking heat this summer, with wildfires from California to Greece. Temperatures topped 30 Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) even in the Arctic Circle in northern Europe.

The stalling of weather patterns could threaten food production. “Persistent hot and dry conditions in Western Europe, Russia and parts of the U.S. threaten cereal yields in these breadbaskets,” the authors wrote.

They linked the slowdown in weather patterns to the Arctic, which is heating at more than twice the global average amid climate change.

The difference in temperature between the chill of the Arctic and warmth further south is a main driver of winds that blow weather systems around the globe, they wrote. With less contrast in temperatures, winds slow and heat or rain can linger longer.

“Evidence is mounting that humanity is messing with these enormous winds,” said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of PIK and co-author of a second study about a severe 2016 wildfire in Canada.

“Fueled by human-made greenhouse-gas emissions, global warming is probably distorting the natural patterns,” he wrote in a statement.

The extent of Arctic ice and snow has been shrinking in recent years, exposing ever more darker-colored water and ground, which soaks up ever more heat and accelerates warming, they said.

Writing in the journal Scientific Reports, Schellnhuber and colleagues found that disruptions to planetary waves were a factor underlying 2016 wildfires in Alberta, which caused damage worth C$4.7 billion ($3.6 billion).
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The World Health Organization says the number of measles cases in Europe jumped sharply during the first six months of 2018 and at least 37 people have died.

The U.N. agency’s European office said Monday more than 41,000 measles cases were reported in the region during the first half of the year — more than in all 12-month periods so far this decade.

The previous highest annual total was 23,927 cases in 2017. A year earlier, only 5,273 cases were reported.

The agency said half — some 23,000 cases — this year occurred in Ukraine, where an insurgency backed by Russia has been fighting the government for four years in the east in a conflict that has killed over 10,000 people.

France, Georgia, Greece, Italy, Russia and Serbia also had more than 1,000 measles infections each so far this year.

Measles, among the world’s most contagious diseases, is a virus that’s spread in the air through coughing or sneezing. It can be prevented with a vaccine that’s been in use since the 1960s, but health officials say vaccination rates of at least 95 percent are needed to prevent epidemics.

Vaccine skepticism remains high in many parts of Europe after past immunization problems.

Measles typically begins with a high fever and also causes a rash on the face and neck. While most people who get it recover, measles is one of the leading causes of death among young children, according to the WHO.

Italy has introduced a new law requiring parents to vaccinate their children against measles and nine other childhood diseases. Romania also passed a similar bill, including hefty fines for parents who didn’t vaccinate their children.

The U.N. agency on Monday called for better surveillance of the disease and increased immunization rates to prevent measles from becoming endemic.
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U.N. agencies and the Bangladesh government have begun distributing liquid petroleum gas stoves in Cox’s Bazar to help prevent further deforestation, which has been accelerating with the huge influx of Rohingya refugees during the past year.

Cox’s Bazar is home to large areas of protected forest and an important wildlife habitat. The arrival of more than 700,000 Rohingya refugees fleeing violence and persecution in Myanmar has put enormous pressure on these precious resources.

U.N. Migration Agency spokesman, Paul Dillon tells VOA, the refugees have been cutting down the trees and clearing land to build makeshift shelters. He says they and many local villagers also rely almost exclusively on firewood to cook their meals.

“Consequently, the forests in that area are being denuded at the rate of roughly four football fields every single day. We are told by the experts at this rate, by 2019 there will be no further forests in that area,” he said.

Scientists note deforestation has devastating consequences for the environment leading to soil erosion, fewer crops, increased flooding and, most significantly, the loss of habitat for millions of species.

Dillon says disappearing forests are putting great pressure on the animals in the region.

“It interrupts migration pathways and regrettably forces these, sort of, artificial confrontations between animals in the wild and communities as they move into areas that have been logged out often-times in search of arable farmland and that type of thing,” he said.

The project aims to distribute liquid petroleum gas stoves and gas cylinders to around 250,000 families over the coming months. U.N. agencies say the stoves will have additional benefits besides helping to prevent deforestation.

For example, they note smoke from firewood burned in homes and shelters without proper ventilation causes many health problems, especially among women and children who spend much of their time indoors.

 

 

 
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Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has abandoned plans to enshrine the nation’s targeted limits of greenhouse gas emissions into law in the face of an angry revolt by his party’s staunch conservatives.

Australia set a target to cut carbon emissions by 26 percent below 2005 by the year 2030, as part of the 2015 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, commonly known as the Paris Agreement.

Turnbull sought to include the targets in the government’s National Energy Guarantee, but he conceded Monday that he could not get the legislation through the House of Representatives, where his Liberal Party holds a fragile one-seat majority. The conservative opposition, led by former Prime Minister Tony Abbott, argue that the government should be focused on cutting soaring electricity prices. 

The internal revolt has led to speculation that Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton will challenge Turnbull for leadership of the Liberal Party, which both men have denied. It also comes amid a new voter survey showing the government trailing the opposition Labor Party 55 percent to 45 percent. The next national elections are scheduled to be held next May. 
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A prosthetic hand might look like a hand and move like a hand. But can it ever feel like a hand? Johns Hopkins University graduate student Luke Osborn says yes. As Faith Lapidus reports, Osborn has developed an “electronic skin” that can help amputees feel pressure and even pain – once more.
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The world’s oceans are filled with trace amounts of uranium, the primary fuel for nuclear power reactors. The trick is extracting it from the seawater. Now, scientists in the U.S. say they have done that using yarn, and extracted 5 grams of the powdered form of uranium used to produce reactor fuel. Faith Lapidus reports.
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With the Democratic Republic of Congo facing its second major Ebola outbreak this year, emergency responders have worked to contain the spread of the disease. Scientists, meanwhile, are testing the effectiveness of experimental vaccines in the field.

Alongside these efforts, researchers in the DRC are collecting data that will improve how we respond to, and prevent, future outbreaks of Ebola and other infectious diseases.

Their work involves building a comprehensive picture of how diseases like Ebola spread by tracking cases and mapping where people live, work and seek health care.

Over time, a more sophisticated understanding of the environments through which contagious diseases spread will lead to faster, more effective treatment.

Long-term response efforts

Anne Rimoin is an associate professor of epidemiology at the UCLA School of Public Health. She’s also the director of the UCLA-DRC Health Research and Training Program, an effort based in Kinshasa, Congo, that’s been underway for 16 years.

Rimoin returned to the U.S. last month from fieldwork in the DRC. She told VOA that her group is collecting data that will benefit responses to not just Ebola but emerging infectious diseases as well as.

“In an outbreak, you have to understand where people are and what their patterns of travel are. Where they’re going, where they’re working, where their fields are,” Rimoin said. “If you don’t know where things are, it becomes very difficult to define a response.”

Collecting this kind of data is especially important in a country like Congo, where small, unmapped villages checker vast forests, and the infrastructure hasn’t, for the most part, been developed.

“The DRC is a very large country,” Rimoin said. “There haven’t been good, accurate maps of the DRC available to date.”

​High-tech and local knowledge

Rimoin’s group partners with several organizations, including the DRC’s Ministry of Health, the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Rimoin said the Health Research and Training Program in Kinshasa uses a mix of high-tech solutions and local knowledge. The group analyzes satellite imagery to understand the terrain and population centers in the DRC. But they also rely on insights from residents to compile a more accurate and complete data set.

These data-collection tools allow Rimoin’s team to figure out not just boundaries but human activities, including traffic flows and health centers.

They plot important landmarks like roads, rivers and health centers. They also track exposure to health care workers and people who have been vaccinated to compare them to other populations, building a more complete understanding of how prevention drugs work.

“It’s important for data to be available so that you can look for trends between outbreaks and try to find commonalities and try to be able to quickly ascertain similarities between outbreaks,” Rimoin said.

Local knowledge

Working with local populations is critical to the project’s success. It’s these experts who know the terrain and the population, and that expertise often proves invaluable, especially when faced with skepticism from residents about the efficacy of vaccines.

By partnering with local organizations and international efforts with a long-term commitment to the country, Rimoin said, the Health Research and Training Program is better positioned to work with communities to understand their needs, concerns and beliefs.

“It’s really important to work with people who are there all the time — not parachuting in,” Rimoin said. 
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The World Health Organization says security issues could hamper efforts to contain an Ebola outbreak in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The outbreak is in conflict-ridden North Kivu province, where some areas are too dangerous for health care workers to go.

As of Wednesday, about two weeks after the Ebola outbreak was declared in North Kivu province, there were 78 confirmed and probable cases of the viral disease, including 44 deaths.

That is nearly double the number of cases reported during a recent and separate Ebola outbreak in Equateur Province.

Health workers have fanned out in North Kivu, tracking down contacts of Ebola victims and giving them an experimental vaccine. But WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic says more cases of Ebola are expected to be seen in the coming days and weeks.

“It will get worse before it gets better,” he said. “We do not know if we are having all transmission chains identified. We expect to see more cases as a result of earlier infections and these infections are developing into illness.”

He tells VOA that health workers are able to move around freely in the towns of Mangina and Beni, which are the epicenters of the disease. It is the other parts of the province that have the WHO worried.

“There are areas just next to Mangina that are level four on the UNDSS Security scale, which means that it is an area not to go to … We still do not have a full epidemiological picture, so … the worst-case scenario is that we have these security blind spots where the epidemic could take hold and then we do not know about it,” he said.

The WHO reports it is using the same Ebola vaccine that helped contain the outbreak in Equateur province.

So far, it says nearly 500 people in North Kivu have been vaccinated, including health care workers and people who have come in contact with confirmed cases of the deadly disease.
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U.S. health officials Thursday approved a new generic version of EpiPen, the emergency allergy medication that triggered a public backlash because of its rising price tag.

The new version from Teva Pharmaceuticals is the first that will be interchangeable with the original penlike injector sold by Mylan. The Food and Drug Administration announced the approval in a statement.

EpiPen injections are stocked by schools and parents nationwide to treat children with severe allergies. They are used in emergencies to stop potentially fatal allergic reactions to insect bites and stings and foods like nuts and eggs.

EpiPen maker Mylan has dominated the $1 billion market for the shots for two decades. Several other companies sell competing shots containing the drug epinephrine, but they aren’t heavily marketed or prescribed by doctors.

In 2016, Congress blasted Mylan in letters and hearings for raising EpiPen’s to $600 for a two-pack, a five-fold increase over nearly a decade. The company responded by launching its own lower-cost generic version for $300.

Mylan continues to sell both versions at those prices, according to data from Elsevier’s Gold Standard Drug Database.

Teva’s generic shot will be the first version that pharmacists can substitute even when doctors prescribe the original EpiPen.

A Teva spokeswoman declined to comment on the drug’s price but said it would launch “in the coming months.” Generic drugs can be priced as much as 80 percent lower than the original product. But those price cuts usually appear after several companies have launched competing versions.

Teva’s bid to sell a generic EpiPen faced multiple setbacks at the FDA, which rejected the company’s initial application in 2016. While epinephrine is a decades-old generic drug, Teva and other would-be competitors struggled to replicate the EpiPen’s auto-injector device.
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In 1995, a patient sick with the Ebola virus, in what was then called Zaire and is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, miraculously recovered from this deadly disease. At that time, when the virus first jumped from animals to man, Ebola meant almost certain death.

Doctors found that this patient had antibodies to fight the virus in his bloodstream even after he recovered. 

Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, invited the patient to the U.S., where researchers cloned the cell that had helped him beat Ebola.

“We brought the person back to the United States to draw his blood and try to clone the B cells that make the antibodies that this person had produced … to then, essentially, clear his virus and, hopefully, protect him against any future exposure,” Fauci told VOA. 

Because the NIH scientists made numerous copies of that cell, it is called a monoclonal antibody — in this case, mAB114. It’s hoped that it can be used to target the Zaire strain of Ebola currently spreading in eastern Congo.

Fauci said mAB114 is still experimental.

“We have done a number of tests in an animal model and have shown that when you infect an animal up to five days after they become infected, and you passively transfer this antibody, you can actually protect the animals from getting sick and they recover,” he said.

Not all treatments that work in animals work in humans, something Fauci knows all too well. One treatment for HIV/AIDS that Fauci found worked well in monkeys had disastrous effects when tested in humans.

Fauci’s staff is conducting a phase one clinical trial in volunteers at the NIH hospital to make sure mAB114 is safe. So far, no one can say whether the treatment works, but because of the dire situation in Congo, and the fear the virus will spread in the armed conflict that is going on in the region, Fauci said the antibody has been given to five people with Ebola.

At a news conference Tuesday, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, said he had been told they were doing well.

As of now, there’s no approved treatment for the disease, although there is a vaccine that protects people who may have been exposed to the virus but who are not sick. 

Other experimental treatments are also being used to help end the outbreak in Congo. One of them is ZMapp, a combination of three monoclonal antibodies. In 2016, NIH found ZMapp safe and well-tolerated, but without an outbreak, it is impossible to prove effectiveness. 

Fauci said another antiviral drug, remdesivir, is being used in patients with Ebola from West Africa, even though that outbreak is over. Scientists have found the Ebola virus can remain in the semen, so men are being treated to prevent further spread.

Remdesivir, or GS-5734, is produced by Gilead. On its website, Gilead says remdesivir is thought to work by blocking a key enzyme the virus needs to reproduce itself. Tomas Cihlar, Gilead’s vice president for biology, is quoted as saying, “Based on animal studies, we believe that the compound is able to penetrate the organs and tissues throughout the body where Ebola replicates.”

So far, there are no proven treatments for Ebola. Scientists are hopeful that that therapeutic antibodies could be the best way to stop this virus. An international study led by Scripps Research suggests that antibodies may be valuable treatments against new viruses and could help a patient’s immune system fight the Ebola virus after being infected.
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