Globalization in the 20th century facilitated the exchange of goods, ideas and technology. But it also helped spread deadly germs and viruses around the world. A new exhibit at the National Museum of Natural History illustrates the impact of these sometimes lethal biological linkages and looks back at the deadliest and scariest epidemics throughout history. Maxim Moskalkov has more.
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President Trump signed an executive order Wednesday to keep migrant children with their parents at the southwestern U.S. border, but more than 2,000 children are living in shelters without their families. Doctors and mental health workers are concerned that some of these children will suffer permanent damage. VOA’s Carol Pearson has more.
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Tracking wildlife migration has been historically difficult in the rugged terrain of Alaska. Researchers primarily rely on either surveys or GPS tracking to understand bird migration patterns. Both methods are expensive, either in terms of time or money. And the trackers are often too large or heavy. 

One way to sidestep these common issues is to record audio from frequently used nesting grounds. Using birdsong allows researchers to unobtrusively study the animals, although there’s a downside. Each day produces a flood of audio recordings from multiple microphones placed around nesting grounds. It takes trained listeners endless hours to search the noisy soundscape for birdsong.

In a recently published paper in the journal Science Advances, U.S. researchers explain how they got around these tracking troubles. Columbia University ecologist Ruth Oliver and her fellow collaborators replaced the human ears with machine learning algorithms to listen to birdsong.

Costly proposition

Oliver told VOA News, “Arrival times of migratory song birds is really important for their reproductive success. And obviously sending people to the Arctic to do field work is very expensive and takes a lot of time” — hence, the scientists’ interest in creating an automated method for tracking bird species.

Oliver and her colleagues focused on migratory songbirds who fly to northern Alaska during their mating season. These birds tend to chirp more frequently as soon as they reach the breeding grounds to attract a mate. Spring is short in Alaska and the birds must breed and hatch their clutch before winter.

The team of researchers recorded the springtime soundscape of northern Alaska for five sequential years. They placed microphones at four sites in the foothills of the Brooks Range, which recorded 1,200 audio hours.

However, Oliver admitted the recordings weren’t always perfect. “There’s a lot of other noise in these recordings” Oliver said. “Even in May in northern Alaska there’s lots of wind, lots of rain, and all of that is confounding when you’re listening to birds.”

The scientists fed hours of audio into two types of machine learning algorithms — one that used human expertise to help train it and one that relied solely on the collected audio. Both algorithms were based on the same model that’s used by applications like Siri and Alexa.

Oliver told VOA that in creating the human-supervised algorithm, she “wrote a little program to randomly sample about 1 percent of the data set” and then listened to 4-second clips. She scored these clips as either containing or not containing songbird vocalizations and then fed this information into the program.

Both algorithms were fairly accurate at estimating when the avian commuters arrived in the foothills. The models showed the importance of snowmelt for the arrival of the traveling birds. The human-trained model was slightly better at recognizing the relationship between weather conditions and bird calls, although neither model specifically tracked individual species.

This technique has great potential according to Emily Jo Williams, vice president of migratory birds and habitat at the American Bird Conservancy, “This kind of technique that allows you to survey populations in those remote areas is really exciting and could allow us to even discover new places where protection and conservation efforts are needed,” she said.

This study looked at nesting grounds near the Alaskan Arctic Refuge, which is a summer home for birds from nearly every continent. For example, the Northern Wheatear travels approximately 21,000 kilometers (13,000 miles) from Africa to summer in the refuge.

Climate change

Williams told VOA, “We know from some research that some birds’ ranges have actually changed, and they’ve moved in response to what we think is a warming climate.” She went on to explain that “the timing of that migration has evolved over eons, and in large part it’s relative to what food sources are available over a particular time, what weather patterns are or aren’t favorable. So you could end up with bird migration out of sync with insect hatches or the phenology of plants that birds have a relationship to.”

Tools like the algorithm created in this study could be used to track how migratory patterns of many species may shift in response to climate change. Using machine learning is a new way to follow these shifting patterns in birds, insects and other animals.
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One more U.S. Embassy employee in Havana, Cuba, has been affected by mysterious health incidents, the State Department said. 

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said one of two Americans recently evacuated from Cuba was “medically confirmed” to have been affected, while the other was “still being evaluated” by doctors. 

25 Americans affected

In all, 25 Americans have been affected by the mystery ailment in Cuba. 

“We still don’t know, to this day, what is causing it and who is responsible,” Nauert said, noting that investigations were underway in Havana as well as Guangzhou, China, where one employee experienced similar symptoms recently.

The United States has said that the Cuba incidents started in late 2016. The State Department calls them “specific attacks” but has not said what caused them or who was behind them. Cuba has adamantly denied involvement or knowledge. 

Initial speculation centered on some type of sonic attack owing to strange sounds heard by those affected, but an interim FBI report in January found no evidence that sound waves could have caused the damage, The Associated Press has reported.

Warning issued in China

The State Department issued a health warning after the employee in China reported experiencing “subtle and vague, but abnormal, sensations of sound and pressure” and was diagnosed with a mild traumatic brain injury.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo described it as a “serious medical incident.” 

The new confirmation came less than a week after the U.S. renewed demands on Cuba to determine the source of the “attacks” on U.S. diplomats. Cuba responded by again denying any involvement in or knowledge of any such attacks.
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Microbes may be helping stir up anxiety and depression in obese people, if results from a new mouse study hold true in humans. 

The authors link the effects to how the brain responds to insulin, the hormone that regulates sugar levels in the blood. 

The research raises questions about whether changing gut microbes, or changing diet, could help treat these conditions. 

Mood, microbes and metabolism

Obesity triggers changes in metabolism — for example, making liver, muscle, fat and other tissues less responsive to insulin. Left untreated, these changes can lead to diabetes. 

Obese people also have higher rates of anxiety and depression. 

“One could say, ‘Maybe that’s just because they’re obese,’ ” said Harvard Medical School diabetes researcher Ronald Kahn, “but others could say, ‘Maybe there’s a metabolic link.’ ”

“And we asked the question, ‘Maybe the metabolic link is at least partly fueled by the microbiome,’ ” the community of microbes living in a person’s gut, he added.

Those microbes change with diet, and Kahn said different microbes might respond differently to the foods we eat.

To test the theory, Kahn and colleagues fed mice a high-fat diet and studied their behavior as the animals became obese. 

They used common tests to gauge anxious and depressed behavior in rodents — for example, how much time the animals spent hiding in a dark box versus exploring a brightly lit area. The more anxious the mouse, the less time it will spend in the light.

Obese mice spent about 25 percent less time in the light than animals on a normal diet, and they scored higher on the other anxiety and depression tests, too.

Return to normal

But those differences disappeared when obese mice were given antibiotics, even though their weight didn’t change much.

“That really says there’s probably something about the microbiome,” Kahn said. 

The researchers then tested how the animals’ microbiomes affected mice raised in a sterile environment with no microbes of their own. 

Bacteria from obese rodents made these germ-free mice more anxious than microbes from normal mice.

But when germ-free mice got microbes from obese animals that had been given antibiotics, they behaved like normal mice. 

To see what parts of the brain might be responsible for the effects, the researchers focused on two regions involved in metabolism and responses to rewards. They found these regions were less responsive to insulin in the obese mice compared with normal-weight animals. 

Again, antibiotics returned those responses to normal. 

The research appears in the journal Molecular Psychiatry. 

“It was actually quite a surprise,” Kahn said. “Even though we had seen some effects on metabolism in the rest of the body, I was very surprised how dramatic and how clear the effects were also on the brain and on behavior.”

Into the unknown

That doesn’t mean antibiotics are the cure for obesity, Kahn warned. The drugs kill good and bad microbes indiscriminately, and taking the medication unnecessarily can contribute to the rising threat of antibiotic resistance. 

Also, what happens in mice does not necessarily happen in humans, he added, or it may happen for only some people. So far, there is not much evidence that probiotics help anxious people. 

“The difficulty is, both of these things — depression and obesity — are complicated things that have multiple, multiple factors influencing them,” said mental health researcher Gregory Simon at Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute, who was not part of the study.

Microbes are likely just one factor, along with environment, genetics, social influences and more, Simon added.

But Kahn said his group’s research raised interesting questions about how food affects our behavior. 

“I think now we can get some idea that there are a lot of things that are being metabolized by gut bacteria that could affect brain function,” he said.

And he said there might be ways to change brain function by changing those bacteria, by eating helpful microbes or by eating foods that sustain them. 

He and his colleagues are working to figure out exactly which of the hundreds of species of gut bacteria are responsible. At the moment, it’s a mystery. 
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Fever, chills, and muscle pain aren’t the symptoms just of malaria. They could be signs of leptospirosis, which infects millions of people each year — primarily in tropical regions. 

The under-reported disease is usually spread though contact with rodents, but a new study finds this trend may not hold in northern Tanzania or beyond.

Research in Asia has tied living in close quarters with rats to outbreaks of leptospirosis. The bacterial infection causes symptoms that are often mistaken for malaria. Severe cases can be life-threatening, says Professor Albert Ko at the Yale School of Public Health.

“Our group has done global burden of disease studies on this and there are over a million a cases a year and roughly 60 thousand deaths,” said Ko.

Common source of fevers

Leptospirosis is becoming recognized as a common source of fevers in Africa. But the source of the disease was unclear. It could be rats, or it could be something else, said Michael Maze, of the University of Otago.

“Well, we know that leptospirosis has many possible animal hosts,” said Maze. “I guess the story starts when we identified how common leptospirosis was the cause of severe fever in people coming to the hospital in northern Tanzania.”

Maze and an international team of researchers asked those patients about their lifestyles: how many rats they saw around their home… whether they owned livestock and if so, what kind?

They also tested blood samples for leptospirosis infections. Of the nearly 900 people tested, almost a third were infected, or had been. 

The researchers also trapped almost 400 rats in nearby villages. They tested the rodents to see if they carried the leptospira bacterium like their Asian cousins. They did not.

But cattle did — they found over seven percent of them carried up to four types of leptospira that could potentially infect humans. Goats and sheep did, too, though less often.

Blood samples match

This result matched the findings from the patients’ blood samples. People who owned livestock were most likely to have leptospirosis infections, especially cattle owners.

“Leptospirosis is carried in the renal tract — so the kidney and the bladder — and comes out in the urine of infected animals,” said Maze. “So even simple things like avoiding urine while doing activities such as, for example, milking cattle would be a good first step.”

Maze recommends abattoir workers and dairy farmers wear gloves and other protective clothing.

“A cow is much bigger and it produces a much larger volume of urine and so that creates a greater opportunity for exposure,” said Maze.

But Maze and colleagues found doctors did not diagnose a single one of the patients in the study with leptospirosis. In fact, one in four active cases was misdiagnosed as malaria — even though the patients’ blood tested negative for parasites.

Symptoms similar

Maze says one reason is because symptoms of the two diseases are similar and there is not an accurate, simple test for leptospirosis that can be run in regional hospitals.

“The second reason is that clinician awareness of these diseases is low,” said Maze. “If you don’t recognize them it becomes a cycle where they’re never diagnosed so you never recognize them.”

Yale’s Albert Ko says the work Maze and his colleagues have done provides a better understanding of how leptospirosis spreads.

“This is an important study specifically because it provides key information on risk factors in a high burden setting, said Ko. “In specifically among this at-risk population of vulnerable pastoralist society.”

 
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China’s decision to stop accepting plastic waste from other countries is causing plastic to pile up around the globe, and wealthy countries must find a way to slow the accumulation of one of the most ubiquitous materials on the planet, a group of scientists said.

The scientists sought to quantify the impact of the Chinese import ban on the worldwide trade in plastic waste, and found that other nations might need to find a home for more than 122 million tons (110 million metric tons) of plastic by 2030. The ban went into effect Dec. 31, 2017, and the stockpiling trend figures to worsen, the scientists said.

Wealthy countries such as the United States, Japan and Germany have long sent their plastic recyclables to China, and the country doesn’t want to be the world’s dumping ground for plastic anymore. The study found China has taken more than 116 million tons (105 million metric tons) of the material since 1992, the equivalent of the weight of more than 300 Empire State Buildings.

The change is forcing countries to rethink how they deal with plastic waste. They need to be more selective about what they choose to recycle, and more fastidious about reusing plastics, said Amy Brooks, first author on the study and a doctoral student in engineering at the University of Georgia. In the meantime, Brooks said, more plastic waste is likely to get incinerated or sent to landfills.

“This is a wake-up call. Historically, we’ve been depending on China to take in this recycled waste and now they are saying no,” she said. “That waste has to be managed, and we have to manage it properly.”

The study was published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. Using United Nations data, it found that China has dwarfed all other plastics importers, accounting for about 45 percent of the world’s plastic waste since 1992. The ban is part of a larger crackdown on foreign garbage, which is viewed as a threat to health and environment.

Some countries that have seen an increase in plastic waste imports since China’s ban — such as Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia — are already looking to enforce bans of their own because they are quickly becoming overburdened, Brooks said.

The study illustrates that plastic, which has a wide array of uses and formulations, is more difficult to recycle than other materials, such as glass and aluminum, said Sherri Mason, who was not involved in the study and is the chair of the geology and environmental sciences department at the State University of New York at Fredonia.

Many consumers attempt to recycle plastic products that can’t ultimately be recycled, Mason said. One solution could be to simplify the variety of plastics used to make products, she said.

“We have to confront this material and our use of it, because so much of it is single use disposable plastic and this is a material that doesn’t go away,” Mason said. “It doesn’t return to the planet the way other materials do.”

The plastics import ban has attracted the attention of the U.S. recycling industry. The National Recycling Coalition said in a statement in mid-May that it must “fundamentally shift how we speak to the public” and “how we collect and process” recyclables.

“We need to look at new uses for these materials,” said Marjorie Griek, the coalition’s executive director. “And how do you get manufacturers to design a product that is more easily recyclable.”

 
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A new film explores the bond between a young man with autism and the sister who cares for him.

Nathan’s Kingdom stars Jacob Lince, a 24-year-old actor who has autism. Cast members say the fantasy-drama was a journey of discovery much like the odyssey of the movie’s characters.

As a child, Lince was diagnosed with high-functioning autism, a condition that hampers the ability to communicate. He developed a talent in acting and became part of a program called Performing Arts Studio West, which provides training for people with developmental disabilities.

“I literally went there, introduced myself and got to really know what they’re all about,” said the film’s writer-director, Olicer J. Munoz. “That’s where Jacob and I discovered each other,” he said.

On a quest

Lince has faced challenges, but none as severe as those faced by the character in the film.

“He is a very complex human being,” Lince said of Nathan, who is battling imaginary demons, embodied through graphic visual effects. “He’s been through a lot in his life, and he’s had this idea in his head since he was very young about ‘the kingdom,’” said Lince, “where he feels he can be safe, and where he can escape all the darkness out there and inside of him.”

The character takes his reluctant sister, Laura, played by Madison Ford, on his quest for the mythical kingdom. Laura is Nathan’s caregiver who is battling a demon of her own — opiate addiction. Together, they embark on a road trip through the Mojave Desert.

An adventure

Ford said that Lince is calm and optimistic, unlike the character in the story.

“Filming this was an adventure in of itself,” she said, “and it was so cool to have an adventure partner there with me,” she said. “Jacob is funny, but he takes his (acting) job seriously, as well,” she added.

The film was a labor of love for Munoz, who had trouble getting funding. He said studios liked the story, but none would offer financing. So, he raised the funds himself with his producers.

“We shot a little bit, ran out of money, raised more money,” he said. “Then we spent all that money for our next block of filming, and then we raised more money. And little by little, we were able to make this film a reality in the course of about 3½ years.”

Fulfilling journey

Nathan’s Kingdom was screened at the historic Grauman’s TCL Chinese Theater in Hollywood as a selection of the Dances with Films festival. About 200 films were selected from more than 2,000 entries.

“We want unique, fresh voices,” said festival co-founder Leslee Scallon. “We want it [the festival] also to have great performances.” Nathan’s Kingdom has both, she said.

Cast members had a hard but fulfilling journey, like the characters in the film, Lince said. 

“We made a lot of friends, and at the end of the day, I think we all did a great job. And it was a fantastic experience,” he added.

Lince is studying filmmaking in college and hopes to make a career in the movie industry. He also hopes to see more roles for actors on the autism spectrum like him, and more stories like Nathan’s Kingdom on the big screen.

About 1 in 59 children in the United States has been identified as having autism spectrum disorder, or ASD, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The condition is about four times more common among boys than girls, the CDC notes.
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June 21st is World Giraffe Day, celebrating the iconic long-necked African animal. But giraffe populations have been decreasing at a rapid pace, and researchers warn they could become extinct in the near future. In northern Kenya, a conservation program is working to protect the native reticulated giraffe, known for its distinctive striped patterns. VOA’s Deborah Block has more.
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Thousands of live animals along with tons of meat, ivory, pangolin scales and timber were seized in a monthlong global crackdown on the illegal wildlife trade that Interpol said exposed the international reach of traffickers.

The live animals recovered in the stings included turtles in Malaysia and parrots in Mexico. Canada intercepted 18 tons of eel meat arriving from Asia. Those arrested included two flight attendants in Los Angeles and a man in Israel whose house was raided after he posted a hunting photograph on social media. 

Operation Thunderstorm, involving 92 countries, yielded seizures worth millions of dollars during May, Interpol said Wednesday.

“The results are spectacular,” said Sheldon Jordan, Canada’s director general of wildlife enforcement. 

Acknowledging the magnitude of the problem, Jordan said global wildlife crime is worth about $150 billion annually and is fourth in value among illegal global trades behind drugs, counterfeiting and human trafficking. 

Criminal syndicates that smuggle flora and fauna often take advantage of porous borders and corrupt officials, transporting illicit cargo at an industrial scale. 

The Thunderstorm swoop included the confiscation of 8 tons of pangolin scales, half of which was found by Vietnamese authorities on a ship from Africa. 

Africa’s four species of pangolins are under increasing pressure from poachers because of the decimation of the four species in Asia, where pangolin scales are used in traditional medicine.

A total of 43 tons of contraband meat – including bear, elephant, crocodile, whale and zebra – 1.3 tons of elephant ivory, 27,000 reptiles, about 4,000 birds, 48 live primates, 14 big cats and two polar bear carcasses were also seized. Several tons of wood and timber were also seized.

China, the world’s largest ivory consumer, banned its domestic trade starting this year in what conservationists hope will relieve pressure on Africa’s besieged elephant populations. While some herds are recovering, a high rate of killing continues in many areas, such as Mozambique’s Niassa reserve. 

Some 1,400 suspects were identified worldwide, Interpol said. Two flight attendants were arrested in Los Angeles carrying live spotted turtles to Asia in personal baggage, said Interpol. Both suspects have been charged with smuggling protected species.

Participating nations were from Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North and South America. The Pacific nation of Vanuatu, which is not an Interpol member, took part. 

Officers searched cars, trucks, boats and containers, sometimes using sniffer dogs and X-ray scanners. 

The operation, Interpol Secretary General Juergen Stock said, showed that wildlife traffickers use the same routes as other criminals, “often hand-in-hand with tax evasion, corruption, money laundering and violent crime.”
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In just 30 years, cities around the world will face dramatically higher risks from extreme heat, coastal flooding, power blackouts and food and water shortages unless climate-changing emissions are curbed, urban researchers warned Tuesday.

Today, for instance, over 200 million people in 350 cities face stifling heat where average daily peak temperatures hit 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) for three months of the year, according to a study released by C40 Cities, a network of major world cities pushing climate action.

But by 2050, more than 1.6 billion people in 970 cities will face those conditions, researchers predicted.

The number of people who are both in poverty and battling brutal heat — usually without air conditioning — will rise tenfold, they said.

“This is a wake-up call,” said Kevin Austin, deputy executive director of C40 Cities, at an international meeting in the South African city of Cape Town on adapting to climate change.

“The magnitude of people affected by heat will be (much) greater than today if we continue to increase greenhouse gases at this rate.”

But cities can take action to directly curb the risks, besides working to cut emissions, he said.

In Seoul, for example, a major elevated thoroughfare through the center of the city has been removed, opening up access to the river and lowering urban heat in the area by at least half a degree Celsius, he said.

South Korea’s capital also has planted more than 16 million trees and created shaded cooling centers for those without air conditioning.

“We want to encourage cities to adopt more of these solutions and implement them as quickly as possible. In the worst case scenario, they will need to do them quickly,” Austin said.

More drought, less water 

The research, carried out by the New York-based Urban Climate Change Research Network, looked at data from more than 2,500 cities and predicted likely conditions if emissions continue to rise at their current rate.

It found that Cape Town’s ongoing battle with drought-driven water shortages could become far more common, with over 650 million people in 500 cities — among them Sao Paulo and Tehran — likely to see their access to water reduced by 2050.

Many thirsty cities are already aiming to set caps on water use per person, with Los Angeles pushing for 200 liters a day, Melbourne for 155 litres and Cape Town a dramatically reduced 50, Austin said.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that an average American today uses at least 300 liters of water per day.

Sharing advice on how to make cuts happen — including insights gained in Cape Town, which has slashed its water use by half in the face of extreme drought — can save cities time and help them make changes faster, Austin said.

But more cities “need to transition in a planned way, not in response to disaster,” he added.

Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille said dealing with a crisis when it arrives leaves little room to maneuver.

“In a crisis like this there is no time to go by trial and error. You unfortunately have to get it right the first time,” she said at the Adaptation Futures conference in Cape Town.

Power risk from floods

The C40 Cities study also found that by mid-century over 800 million people will live in 570 coastal cities at risk of flooding from weather extremes and sea level rise.

Flooding presents a particular risk to urban power supplies, with many power stations located in flood-prone areas – and everything from transportation to heating and hospitals at risk if power plants flood in cities from London to Rio de Janeiro, the study noted.

Decentralizing power systems – including by getting clean energy from a larger number of smaller power plants – could help cut the risks, researchers said.

But flooding risks may be coming faster than expected.

Patrick Child, the European Commission’s deputy director-general for research and innovation, said a predicted one-meter (3-foot) rise in global sea level, once anticipated by 2100, is now expected by 2070.

Last year already saw the highest-ever documented economic losses from severe weather and climate change globally, he said.

Experts at the adaptation meeting also predicted that extreme weather could bring cascading problems for cities, with flooding, for instance, triggering everything from disease outbreaks to road failures, food shortages and closed schools.

Looking at just one type of problem — such as a health threats from extreme heat, or sea level rise — isn’t enough to capture the risks, said Cynthia Rosenzweig, a climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the authors of the report.

“In cities, all of these impacts interact with each other, and are all happening at the same time,” she said.

Solutions also need combined approaches, with engineering efforts to cut flooding, for instance, working hand in hand with things like better protection of flood-absorbing wetlands, Rosenzweig said.

She said she hoped the research would help city officials prioritize what changes need to happen first to better protect their citizens from climate threats.

In cities “it’s often overwhelming, with so many things to do,” she said.
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Just after a morning rain, Gourma Mamadou was shopping in this capital city’s crowded, open-air Kaloum market. The young man said he was well aware of the current Ebola outbreak simmering some 4,000 kilometers to the southeast in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the World Health Organization reports it has killed 28 people since April.

The outbreak may be relatively far away, but fear of Ebola is not.

Madamou said most of the Guineans he knows don’t mention Ebola, as if just speaking the word would invoke its terrible wrath. The virus ravaged Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone from 2014 into 2016, leaving 11,000 people dead, including 2,500 in his country.

People “are watching carefully,” the young shopper said, suggesting that frequent hand-washing and other hygienic precautions grew more commonplace with the Ebola experience. “Sometimes, it’s hard. That disease is so viral, but since it’s been eradicated, we don’t want it back in Guinea.”

Some good also grew out of Guinea’s exposure to the virus: more information. Late in the West African outbreak, almost 6,000 people in Guinea were vaccinated with an experimental therapeutic, V920. A December 2016 report in The Lancet medical journal said the inoculations bolstered the interim finding that the vaccine “offers substantial protection.”

That same vaccine, not yet licensed in any country, is now being used in the DRC’s northwestern region. Pharmaceutical company Merck sent roughly 8,600 doses to Equateur province.

Dr. Sakoba Keita, who oversaw Guinea’s Ebola response and directs the country’s National Health Security Center, praised the vaccine.

“For us, the vaccine is very effective,” he said, saying it protected 95 percent of those inoculated and “greatly helped stop the chain of transmission of the Ebola virus in Guinea. That is the reason why the vaccine is at the forefront of our response mechanisms.”

Keita, more commonly known as “Dr. Ebola,” leads Guinea’s fight against a recurrence of the disease. He said the country of 13 million learned hard lessons from its Ebola experience.

Like its neighbors Liberia and Sierra Leone, Guinea was unfamiliar with the deadly virus. The outbreak, traced to a young boy infected by a bat in a Guinean jungle in December 2013, wasn’t identified until March 2014.

Then, as now, the international community stepped in to help. The World Health Organization worked with local governments to coordinate a response. Aid groups such as Doctors Without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres, or MSF) provided medical teams to support local health care workers and treat patients.

The United States was among the foreign governments joining in the effort to halt the disease, sending health workers, researchers and aid to help with a public awareness campaign, disease tracking and patients’ treatment.

The DRC has the most experience in combating the disease, which originally surfaced in 1976 in an area near the Ebola River. When Ebola broke out in Guinea, the DRC sent experts there.

So, when the DRC’s ninth Ebola outbreak surfaced months ago, Guinea — at the WHO’s request — sent medical personnel in a gesture of solidarity.

Given the DRC’s repeated outbreaks, Keita said it’s important to be ready in case Ebola ever returns to his country. 

Keito said Guinea is more prepared now than it was before its Ebola outbreak. Health workers have learned to recognize the disease and its symptoms. The general public is more aware of it, too. And Conakry’s Donka Hospital — the country’s biggest health facility, where MSF operated an Ebola treatment center — is being expanded to meet needs.

“As we learn new things about the disease,” Keito said, “we prepare so that we are ready to contain it quickly if we were to face a new outbreak.”

Abdourahmane Dia is a multimedia journalist with VOA’s French to Africa Service.
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Menstruation often means missing school for many girls in parts of Africa. But should the state provide sanitary products to girls who cannot afford them to prevent them from falling behind in their studies?

That question continues to stir debate in several East African countries but especially in Kenya, where President Uhuru Kenyatta last year signed the  Basic Education Amendment Act requiring the government to provide free sanitary towels to schoolgirls. 

A 2016 U.N. report estimated that one in 10 girls in Sub-Saharan Africa misses school during her menstrual cycle due to an inability to access affordable sanitary products.

After two years of debate, Kenya’s parliament voted overwhelmingly last year in favor of a measure that advocates say lifts that barrier to education. In June of 2017, President Kenyatta signed the amendment into law.

Sanitary towels handed out

This May, Gender Affairs Cabinet Secretary Margaret Kobia cleared the way for the distribution of one million sanitary towels to girls in Kenya’s Makueni and Kitui counties.

The government said it targeted more than 200,000 schoolgirls for distribution as part of a pilot program.

Through funds provided by the government  and channeled to the county governments, the new law is set to benefit girls in all of Kenya’s 47 counties.

The government allocated $4.6 million to the gender department ministry to buy the towels.

Femme International

Rachel Ouko is the Nairobi program coordinator for Femme International, a non-profit organization that provides menstrual cups and reusable, washable pads to underprivileged girls in Kenya and Tanzania.

“If that system can work very well, it will have a great impact on school-going girl,” Ouko said. “First of all, we have free education, so no girl should have an excuse of not going to school. Then there is free sanitary pads, so no girl should not have an excuse of going to school because they lack sanitary pads.”

Activists around the region say the issue is most pronounced in rural areas, and the problem is more complex than just supplying sanitary pads.

In 2017, the U.N. Children’s Fund estimated around 60 percent of girls in Uganda missed class because their schools lacked private toilets and washing facilities to help them manage during their periods.

Cycle of frustration

Regina Kasebe is a Uganda social worker with Action Alliance, also known as Solidarity Uganda.

“Issues of women and girls cut across nations and you find that in schools when these young girls, most of them come from poor families and in the schools where we majorly work with and the challenge they have is during menstruation,” Kasebe said.

“Because they do not have sanitary towels, they do not use anything, so for those days you have to stay home you cannot go to school when you are in such a situation, so there is missing school during the days of menstruation and also they drop out because they get frustrated because they cannot continue handling the same issue over and over again,” she said.

Kasebe said girls in rural areas are also more likely to be married off once they have started menstruating, further contributing to drop-out rates.

Several African nations have taken steps to improve access to sanitary products for both women and girls.

Uganda announced in 2017 that sanitary pads would be exempt from value-added tax, and in November, Kenya removed duties on raw materials used in the production of sanitary pads to help make the product more affordable.

Missed work, school

According to Sustainable Health Enterprises, an NGO, 18 percent of women and girls in Rwanda missed work or school last year because they could not afford to buy menstrual pads. The NGO estimates that a lack of affordable sanitary pads costs Rwanda’s economy $115 million per year.

Activists hope other countries in the region will follow Kenya’s example and take steps to make sanitary products more accessible, and thus help girls overcome a big disadvantage they have been facing at school.
…

As a boy growing up in Kansas, Nick Hague looked up at the stars and wanted to explore the unknown. In October, his dream will come true when he blasts off on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station.

Before rocketing into space from Kazakhstan on Expedition 57 for his six-month tour, the 42-year-old father has undergone extensive training in everything from spacewalks to robotics to Russian and the psychology of sharing small spaces.

Preparation was “a 2-1/2-year mission on the home front,” Hague said from inside a replica of the space station at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

An engineer and colonel in the U.S. Air Force, Hague was one of eight selected in 2013 for NASA’s astronaut candidate training program. He is one of 42 active astronauts eligible for a flight assignment.

Hague said he found his love of space early: “Growing up as a little boy, staring up the night sky and wanting to just explore the unknown and figure out what’s out there and go find new things.”

In the Air Force, Hague worked as an engineer on satellites and aircraft. Then he attended test pilot school at Edwards Air Force Base, and realized his dream might be within reach.

Training was intense. After receiving instructions on how to use equipment during a spacewalk, Hague once donned his space suit for 6-1/2 hours of underwater simulation at the neutral buoyancy laboratory in Houston, which mimics zero gravity in space using a 40-foot deep pool.

“I have practiced a bunch of different skills … whatever they need me to do when I go outside and do a spacewalk,” he said.

In addition to Houston, Hague has trained with NASA’s partners in Russia, Japan and Europe. He said the long periods of separation from his wife, who is also in the U.S. Air Force, and two young boys is one of the most challenging parts of the job.

While his sons appreciate the “neat” work their father is doing, Hague said he remains “just dorky dad” at home.

Hague said he looks forward to being the eyes and ears of scientists back on Earth. He will work with Russian cosmonauts to monitor shifts in bodily fluids that occur in space. Some astronauts have returned from space missions with changes in eyesight.

Scientists said they hope to learn if there is a correlation between fluid shifts and vision. Such issues need to be better understood before humans are sent on longer space flights into deep space.

Just as important as studying the science of the mission, Hague said, is understanding the psychology involved in a space station almost the size of a football field with six sleeping quarters, two bathrooms and a gym.

Astronauts must learn to work in a team, resolve personal conflicts and do even small things like minding their personal items in what Hague called “that flying test bed” so they do not clutter others’ work spaces.

“It’s nerve-wracking. All the emotions that are going to be kind of coursing through me,” he said. “You’re leaving family for an extended period of time, so it can be stressful.”

On the plus side: “You’re getting to fulfill a childhood dream.”
…

At a research facility in Gabon, one isolated building stands behind an electrified fence, under round-the-clock scrutiny by video cameras. The locked-down P4 lab is built to handle the world’s most dangerous viruses, including Ebola.

“Only four people, three researchers and a technician, are authorized to go inside the P4,” said virologist Illich Mombo, who is in charge of the lab, one of only two in all of Africa that is authorized to handle deadly Ebola, Marburg and Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever viruses. The other is in Johannesburg.

The P4 was put up 800 metres (half a mile) distant from older buildings of the Franceville International Centre for Medical Research (CIRMF), in large grounds on the outskirts of Franceville, the chief city in the southeastern Haut-Ogooue province.

Filming the ultra-high-security lab or even taking photos is banned and the handful of people allowed inside have security badges. Backup power plants ensure an uninterruptable electricity supply. “Even the air that we breathe is filtered,” Mombo explains.

When he goes into the P4 lab to work on a sample of suspect virus such as Ebola — which has claimed 28 lives in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) during an outbreak in the past six weeks — Mombo wears a head-to-foot biohazard suit.

The special clothing is destroyed as soon as he has finished. Draconian measures are in force to prevent any risk of contamination, with potentially disastrous effects.

‘Teams on alert’

Once a suspect virus has been “inactivated” — a technique that stops the sample from being contagious — it is carefully taken from the P4 unit to other CIRMF laboratories in the compound, where it is analysed.

Specialized teams will scrutinize it, looking to confirm its strain of Ebola and hunting for clues such as the virus’s ancestry and evolution, which are vital for tracking the spread of the disease.

CIRMF director Jean-Sylvain Koumba, a colonel in the Gabonese army and a military doctor, said lab teams had been “placed on alert” to handle Ebola samples sent on by the National Institute of Biomedical Resarch in the DRC capital Kinshasa.

The nature of the sample can be determined with rare precision, for the facility has state-of-the-art equipment matched in few other places worldwide.

“On average, it takes 24 to 48 hours between the time when a sample arrives and when we get the results,” Mombo said.

Founded in 1979 by Gabon’s late president Omar Bongo Ondimba to study national fertility rates, the CIRMF moved on to AIDS, malaria, cancer, viral diseases and the neglected tropical maladies that affect a billion people around the world, according to the WHO.

The center is financed by the Gabonese state, whose main wealth is derived from oil exports, and gets help from France.

In all, 150 people work for the CIRMF and live on the huge premises. Its reputation draws scientists, students and apprentices from Asia, Europe and the United States, as well as Africa.

“[The] CIRMF is uniquely suited to study infectious diseases of the Congolese tropical rain forest, the second world’s largest rain forest,” two French scientists, Eric Leroy and Jean-Paul Gonzalez, wrote in the specialist journal Viruses in 2012.

“[It] is dedicated to conduct medical research of the highest standard … with unrivaled infrastructure, multiple sites and multidisciplinary teams.”

Animal ‘reservoir’?

The facility also conducts investigations into how lethal tropical pathogens are able to leap the species barrier, said Gael Darren Maganga, who helps run the unit studying the emergence of viral diseases.

“A passive watch consists of taking a sample from a dead animal after a request, while the active watch is when we go out ourselves to do fieldwork and take samples,” he said.

A major center of interest is the bat, seen as a potential “reservoir” — a natural haven — for the Ebola virus, said Maganga. Staff regularly go out all over Gabon to take samples of saliva, fecal matter and blood.

The consumption of monkey flesh and other bush meat is common practice in central Africa.

“It’s still a hypothesis, but the transmission to human beings could be by direct contact, for instance by getting scratches [from a bat] in caves, or by handling apes which have been infected by bat saliva,” he said.

 

 

 
…

Parents suspicious that their children may be addicted to video games now have support from health authorities. The World Health Organization has listed “gaming disorder” as a new mental health problem on its 11th edition of  International Classification of Diseases, released on Monday. But as VOA’s Zlatica Hoke reports, not all psychologists agree that compulsive gaming should be on that list.
…

Despite decades of research, there has been no treatment to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s in humans. But scientists have found a synthetic compound that can be used to slow the disease in mice. Steve Baragona narrates this report from Faith Lapidus.
…

We were warned.

On June 23, 1988, a sultry day in Washington, James Hansen told Congress and the world that global warming wasn’t approaching — it had already arrived. The testimony of the top NASA scientist, said Rice University historian Douglas Brinkley, was “the opening salvo of the age of climate change.”

Thirty years later, it’s clear that Hansen and other doomsayers were right. But the change has been so sweeping that it is easy to lose sight of effects large and small — some obvious, others less conspicuous.

Earth is noticeably hotter, the weather stormier and more extreme. Polar regions have lost billions of tons of ice; sea levels have been raised by trillions of gallons of water. Far more wildfires rage.

Over 30 years — the time period climate scientists often use in their studies in order to minimize natural weather variations — the world’s annual temperature has warmed nearly 1 degree (0.54 degrees Celsius), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And the temperature in the United States has gone up even more — nearly 1.6 degrees.

“The biggest change over the last 30 years, which is most of my life, is that we’re no longer thinking just about the future,” said Kathie Dello, a climate scientist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. “Climate change is here, it’s now and it’s hitting us hard from all sides.”

Warming hasn’t been just global, it’s been all too local. According to an Associated Press statistical analysis of 30 years of weather, ice, fire, ocean, biological and other data, every single one of the 344 climate divisions in the Lower 48 states — NOAA groupings of counties with similar weather — has warmed significantly, as has each of 188 cities examined.

The effects have been felt in cities from Atlantic City, New Jersey, where the yearly average temperature rose 2.9 degrees in the past 30 years, to Yakima, Washington, where the thermometer jumped a tad more. In the middle, Des Moines, Iowa, warmed by 3.3 degrees since 1988.

South central Colorado, the climate division just outside Salida, has warmed 2.3 degrees on average since 1988, among the warmest divisions in the contiguous United States.

When she was a little girl 30 years ago, winery marketing chief Jessica Shook used to cross country ski from her Salida doorstep in winter. It was that cold and there was that much snow. Now, she has to drive about 50 miles for snow that’s not on mountain tops, she said.

“T-shirt weather in January, that never used to happen when I was a child,” Shook said. When Buel Mattix bought his heating and cooling system company 15 years ago in Salida, he had maybe four air conditioning jobs a year. Now he’s got a waiting list of 10 to 15 air conditioning jobs long and may not get to all of them.

Wildfires

And then there’s the effect on wildfires. Veteran Salida firefighter Mike Sugaski used to think a fire of 10,000 acres was big. Now he fights fires 10 times as large.

“You kind of keep saying ‘How can they get much worse?’ But they do,” said Sugaski, who was riding his mountain bike on what usually are ski trails in January this year.

In fact, wildfires in the United States now consume more than twice the acreage they did 30 years ago.

The statistics tracking climate change since 1988 are almost numbing. North America and Europe have warmed 1.89 degrees — more than any other continent. The Northern Hemisphere has warmed more than the Southern, the land faster than the ocean. Across the United States, temperature increases were most evident at night and in summer and fall. Heat rose at a higher rate in the North than the South.

Heat records

Since 1988, daily heat records have been broken more than 2.3 million times at weather stations across the nation, half a million times more than cold records were broken.

Doreen Pollack fled Chicago cold for Phoenix more than two decades ago, but in the past 30 years nighttime summer heat has increased almost 3.3 degrees there. She said when the power goes out, it gets unbearable, adding: “Be careful what you ask for.”

The AP interviewed more than 50 scientists who confirmed the depth and spread of warming.

Clara Deser, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, said that when dealing with 30-year time periods in smaller regions than continents or the globe as a whole, it would be unwise to say all the warming is man-made. Her studies show that in some places in North America — though not most — natural weather variability could account for as much as half of local warming.

But when you look at the globe as a whole, especially since 1970, nearly all the warming is man-made, said Zeke Hausfather of the independent science group Berkeley Earth. Without extra carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, he said, the Earth would be slightly cooling from a weakening sun. Numerous scientific studies and government reports calculate that greenhouse gases in the big picture account for more than 90 percent of post-industrial Earth’s warming.

“It would take centuries to a millennium to accomplish that kind of change with natural causes. This, in that context, is a dizzying pace,” said Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.

Since the 1800s, scientists have demonstrated that certain gases in Earth’s atmosphere trap heat from the sun like a blanket. Human activities such as burning of coal, oil and gasoline are releasing more of those gases into the atmosphere, especially carbon dioxide. U.S. and international science reports say that more than 90 percent of the warming that has happened since 1950 is man-made.

Extremes

Others cautioned that what might seem to be small increases in temperature should not be taken lightly.  

“One or two degrees may not sound like much, but raising your thermostat by just that amount will make a noticeable effect on your comfort,” said Deke Arndt, NOAA’s climate monitoring chief in Asheville, North Carolina, which has warmed nearly 1.8 degrees in 30 years.

Arndt said average temperatures don’t tell the entire story: “It’s the extremes that these changes bring.”

The nation’s extreme weather — flood-inducing downpours, extended droughts, heat waves and bitter cold and snow — has doubled in 30 years, according to a federal index.

The Northeast’s extreme rainfall has more than doubled. Brockton, Massachusetts, had only one day with at least four inches of rain from 1957 to 1988, but a dozen of them in the 30 years since, according to NOAA records. Ellicott City, Maryland, just had its second thousand-year flood in little less than two years.

And the summer’s named Atlantic storms? On average, the first one now forms nearly a month earlier than it did in 1988, according to University of Miami hurricane researcher Brian McNoldy.

The 14 costliest hurricanes in American history, adjusted for inflation, have hit since 1988, reflecting both growing coastal development and a span that included the most intense Atlantic storms on record.

“The collective damage done by Atlantic hurricanes in 2017 was well more than half of the entire budget of our Department of Defense,” said MIT’s Kerry Emanuel.

Arctic ice

Climate scientists point to the Arctic as the place where climate change is most noticeable with dramatic sea ice loss, a melting Greenland ice sheet, receding glaciers and thawing permafrost. The Arctic has warmed twice as fast as the rest of the world.

Alaska’s annual average temperature has warmed 2.4 degrees since 1988 and 5.4 degrees in the winter.  Since 1988, Utqiagvik, Alaska, formerly known as Barrow, has warmed more than 6 degrees yearly and more than 9 degrees in winter.

“The temperature change is noticeable. Our ground is thawing,” said Mike Aamodt, 73, the city’s former acting mayor. He had to move his own cabins at least four times because of coastal erosion and thawing ground due to global warming. “We live the climate change.”

The amount of Arctic sea ice in September, when it shrinks the most, fell by nearly one third since 1988. It is disappearing 50 years faster than scientists predicted, said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University.

“There is a new Arctic now because the Arctic ocean is now navigable” at times in the summer, said Mark Serreze, director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

The vast majority of glaciers around the world have shrunk. A NASA satellite that measures shifts in gravity calculated that Earth’s glaciers lost 279 billion tons of ice — nearly 67 trillion gallons of water — from 2002 to 2017. In 1986, the Begich Boggs visitor center at Alaska’s Chugach National Forest opened to highlight the Portage glacier. But the glacier keeps shrinking.

“You absolutely cannot see it from the visitor center and you haven’t in the last 15 or so years,” said climatologist Brian Brettschneider of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica have also shriveled, melting about 455 billion tons of ice into water, according to the NASA satellite. That’s enough to cover the state of Georgia in water nearly 9 feet deep.

Sea level

And it is enough — coupled with all the other melting ice — to raise the level of the seas. Overall, NASA satellites have shown three inches of sea level rise (75 millimeters) in just the past 25 years.

With more than 70 percent of the Earth covered by oceans, a 3-inch increase means about 6,500 cubic miles (27,150 cubic km) of extra water. That’s enough to cover the entire United States with water about 9 feet deep.

It’s a fitting metaphor for climate change, say scientists: We’re in deep, and getting deeper.

“Thirty years ago, we may have seen this coming as a train in the distance,” NOAA’s Arndt said. “The train is in our living room now.”
…

Exhausted but relieved, Yariani Flores lay next to her healthy newborn son, along with four other Venezuelan women who just gave birth in a hospital in Colombia’s border city of Cucuta.

Thousands of Venezuelan women have done the same over the past few years, as the health system in their home country has crumbled. They crossed the border, driven by fear that they or their babies could die.

Early in her pregnancy, Flores sought a pre-natal checkup at a municipal hospital in Venezuela’s frontier state of Tachira only to be told that there was little point.

“The doctor said, ‘Don’t bother coming here, I can’t do much for you,'” said Flores, lying in the 12-bed maternity ward at Cucuta’s Erasmo Meoz University Hospital. “She recommended I come to Cucuta and have the birth here.”

Venezuela’s economic crisis has laid waste to its health system. The numbers of babies and women dying during or after childbirth have soared, while medicines and supplies have become increasingly scarce.

“You have to bring everything to the hospital in Venezuela,” said Flores, a 33-year-old mother of five. “There aren’t even any surgical gloves.”

A March survey of 137 hospitals, led by the opposition-dominated Congress, showed that they often lack basic equipment like catheters, as well as incubators and x-ray units.

Venezuelan hospitals are also plagued by water and electricity outages, and only 7 percent of emergency services are fully operative, the survey found.

Infant mortality in the oil-rich nation rose 30 percent last year, according to latest government data. Maternal mortality – dying during pregnancy or within 42 days of giving birth – shot up by 65 percent.

Healthcare Overwhelmed

Venezuela’s economic meltdown, including hyperinflation, is now putting a financial strain on the health system in Cucuta and other Colombian cities.

Nearly 820,000 Venezuelans have left their homeland to live in Colombia during the last 15 months, with arrivals expected to continue, according to Colombian authorities.

Cucuta, the largest city along the porous frontier and separated by a bridge that connects with Venezuela, has borne the brunt of the influx.

At the main hospital alone, Erasmo Meoz, about 14,000 Venezuelan patients have been treated in the past three years, most with no health insurance, said Juan Agustin Ramirez, director of the 500-bed facility.

The hospital has debts of about $6 million accumulated to care for Venezuelans, which the Colombian government has yet to reimburse as it promised last year, Ramirez said.

“This has created a financial crisis … and there comes a time when we collapse,” he said.

Until recently, the hospital treated only a few Venezuelans, mostly for road injuries, Ramirez said.

But now, on any given day, up to one in five patients at the hospital is Venezuelan, and its crowded emergency ward is overwhelmed.

Many are children suffering skin diseases, diarrhea and respiratory problems. Others are women who have high risk pregnancies and arrive malnourished, having had few or no pre-natal checkups.

“It’s a sign that something serious is happening with public health in Venezuela,” Ramirez told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Brother Nation

Ramirez said Colombia has a duty to help Venezuelans.

Colombians often refer to Venezuelans as their “brothers,” as they share close cultural and family ties.

In past decades, it was Venezuela that opened its doors to millions of Colombians fleeing civil war. Many found jobs and cutting-edge medical care in the once prosperous nation, Ramirez said.

“We can’t forget that during all these years of violence in Colombia, four to five million Colombians went to Venezuela where they were given services for free,” Ramirez said. “We have an immense debt with Venezuela.”

In the past year, about 54,500 Venezuelan migrants have received emergency care in public hospitals across Colombia, according to authorities, while nearly 200,000 have been vaccinated, many at border crossings.

But only patients needing emergency care, including pregnant women, get free treatment.

Those with chronic illnesses, like cancer, kidney failure, and HIV/AIDS are turned away because of a lack of resources.

“For those poor people, the situation is catastrophic,” Ramirez said.

Earlier this month, the Organization of American States reiterated its call on Venezuela to allow international aid into the country, to ease what it has described a “humanitarian crisis.”

Many expect the migration to continue following the re-election of Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolas Maduro last month, which the United States called “a sham” and many countries refused to recognize.

“We are not prepared, nor are we going to be prepared, if there’s a bigger exodus of citizens from Venezuela as conditions deteriorate even more,” Ramirez said.

Malnutrition

Another casualty of Venezuela’s crisis was laid bare at the hospital’s children’s ward.

A severely underweight four-month-old baby from Venezuela’s Yukpa tribe slept, hooked up to an intravenous tube to help him recover from malnutrition.

About 200 Yukpas have fled hunger in their ancestral lands.

They now live in ragged, makeshift tents just inside Colombia, near the border crossing.

Across town at a shelter run by the Scalabrini International Migration Network, a Catholic organization for migrant aid, pregnant women are given priority while other Venezuelans sleep on cardboard outside, waiting for a bed and a hot meal.

Keila Diaz, 23, who is heavily pregnant with her second child, came to the shelter with her husband in May. When the contractions start, she said, she will head to the hospital.

“I’m afraid to have my baby in Venezuela. Babies die, mothers die giving birth over there,” said Diaz, gently rubbing her bulging belly. “I have a better chance here.”
…

Women must be at the heart of climate action if the world is to limit the deadly impact of disasters such as floods, former Irish president and U.N. rights commissioner Mary Robinson said on Monday.

Robinson, also a former U.N. climate envoy, said women were most adversely affected by disasters and yet are rarely “put front and center” of efforts to protect the most vulnerable.

“Climate change is a man-made problem and must have a feminist solution,” she said at a meeting of climate experts at London’s Marshall Institute for Philanthropy and Entrepreneurship.

“Feminism doesn’t mean excluding men, it’s about being more inclusive of women and – in this case – acknowledging the role they can play in tackling climate change.”

Research has shown that women’s vulnerabilities are exposed during the chaos of cyclones, earthquakes and floods, according to the British think-tank Overseas Development Institute.

In many developing countries, for example, women are involved in food production, but are not allowed to manage the cash earned by selling their crops, said Robinson.

The lack of access to financial resources can hamper their ability to cope with extreme weather, she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation on the sidelines of the event.

“Women all over the world are … on the front lines of the fall-out from climate change and therefore on the forefront of climate action,” said Natalie Samarasinghe, executive director of Britain’s United Nations Association.

“What we — the international community — need to do is talk to them, learn from them and support them in scaling up what they know works best in their communities,” she said at the meeting.

Robinson served as Irish president from 1990-1997 before taking over as the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, and now leads a foundation devoted to climate justice.
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Vowing to reclaim U.S. leadership in space, President Donald Trump announced Monday he is directing the Pentagon to create a new “Space Force” as an independent service branch aimed at ensuring American supremacy in space.

 

Trump envisioned a bright future for the U.S. space program, pledging to revive the country’s flagging efforts, return to the moon and eventually send a manned mission that would reach Mars. The president framed space as a national security issue, saying he does not want “China and Russia and other countries leading us.”

 

“My administration is reclaiming America’s heritage as the world’s greatest spacefaring nation,” Trump said in the East Room, joined by members of his space council. “The essence of the American character is to explore new horizons and to tame new frontiers.”

 

Trump had previously suggested the possibility of creating a space unit that would include portions equivalent to parts of the Air Force, Army and Navy. But his directive will task the Defense Department to begin the process of establishing the ‘Space Force’ as the sixth branch of the U.S. armed forces. He said the new branch’s creation will be overseen by Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

 

“When it comes to defending America, it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space,” Trump said. He added: “We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force, separate but equal.”

 

The president also used the White House event to establish a new policy for reducing satellite clutter in space. The policy calls for providing a safe and secure environment up in orbit, as satellite traffic increases. It also sets up new guidelines for satellite design and operation, to avoid collisions and spacecraft breakups.

 

Trump was joined by Vice President Mike Pence, who leads the recently revived space council, and several Cabinet members, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, retired astronauts and scientists.

 

The council’s executive secretary, Scott Pace, told reporters before the meeting that space is becoming increasingly congested and current guidelines are inadequate to address the challenge.
…

For the first time, the World Health Organization is adding Gaming disorder to the section on Mental and Addictive Disorders in its new International Classification of Diseases. The ICD provides data on the causes of thousands of diseases, injuries and deaths across the globe and information on prevention and treatment.

The International Classification of Diseases was last revised 28 years ago.

Changes, which have occurred since then are reflected in this edition. Gaming disorder has been added to the section on mental and addictive disorders because demand for services to tackle this condition has been growing.

Gaming disorders usually are linked to a system of rewards or incentives, such as accumulating points in competition with others or winning money. These games are commonly played on electronic and video devices.

WHO officials say statistics, mainly from East and South Asian countries, show only a very small two to three percent of people are addicted to Gaming.

Director of WHO’s Department for Mental Health and Substance Abuse, Shekhar Saxena, describes some of the warning signs of addictive Gaming behavior.

“Be careful if the person you are with, a child or another person is using Gaming in an excessive manner… If it is consuming too much time and if it is interfering with the expected functions of the person, whether it is studies, whether it is socialization, whether it is work, then you need to be cautious and perhaps seek help,” said Saxena.

In the previous WHO classification, gender identity disorders, such as transsexualism were listed under mental and behavioral conditions. Saxena says this now has been moved to the chapter on disorders of sexual behavior along with some other conditions.

“The people with gender identity disorder should be not categorized as a mental disorder because in many cases, in many countries it can be stigmatizing, and it can actually decrease their chances of seeking help because of legal provisions in many countries,” said Saxena.

A new chapter also has been added on traditional medicine. Although traditional medicine is used by millions of people worldwide, it never before has been classified by WHO in this system.

 

 

 

 
…

Astronomers and stargazers will get a chance to get up close and personal with Mars over the next six weeks, as the Earth passes between the Red Planet and the sun.

Mars will make its closest swing toward Earth, bringing it closer and appearing brighter, than it has in the past 15 years.

In 2003, Mars came within 56.1 million kilometers of Earth, the closest it had come in 60,000 years, according to the Weather Channel.

This year the two planets won’t get quite as cozy. The Weather Channel said Mars will appear the brightest to Earth stargazers on July 31, when the two planets are just 57.6 million kilometers apart.

How large Mars appears in the sky to people on Earth depends on where the two neighboring planets are in their elliptical journey. While it takes Earth 365 days to orbit the sun, it takes Mars almost twice as long, or 687 days.

In 2016, the planets were at the opposite ends of their orbits, with 75.6 million kilometers between them, making Mars appear very small.

The next time Mars comes this close to Earth will be in March 2035.

 
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For 25 years, Patrick Matondo has earned a living buying and selling monkeys, bats and other animals popularly known as bush meat along the Congo River. Standing on the riverbank in Mbandaka, a city affected by the deadly new outbreak of the Ebola virus, the father of five said that for the first time he’s worried he won’t be able to support his family.

“Since Ebola was declared, business has decreased by almost half. It’s really, really bad,” the 47-year-old said, hanging his head.

Congo’s latest Ebola outbreak declared in May has 38 confirmed cases, including 14 deaths. The discovery of a handful of Ebola cases among Mbandaka’s more than 1 million residents also has hurt the economy, especially among traders of meat from wild animals.

The virus, which spreads through bodily fluids of those infected, has been known to jump from animals such as monkeys and bats to humans. In the West Africa outbreak four years ago that killed more than 11,000 people, it was widely suspected that the epidemic began when a 2-year-old boy in Guinea was infected by a bat.

Usually the wild animals are highly sought-after as popular sources of protein along with beef and pork, and cargo ships carrying the smoked meat arrive daily in the city, the trade hub for Congo’s northwestern Equateur province. Meanwhile, bush meat markets still see locals bartering for the animals, both dead and alive. Prospective buyers pause at tables piled with monkey meat, picking up blackened chunks one by one for a closer look.

“Meat is very important for people here. It’s one of the biggest industries in Mbandaka,” said Matondo, a leader in the city’s bush meat association.

Dr. Pierre Rollin, an Ebola expert with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said if the meat is cooked, smoked or dried it kills the virus. The people at greatest risk are hunters and butchers who process the meat, he said.

The World Health Organization has advised against trade and travel restrictions because of the current outbreak, which is mostly in remote areas.

Boats with bush meat continue to depart for the capital, Kinshasa, 600 kilometers (323 miles) downstream and for villages tucked deep in the rainforest up and down the river. Disease experts warned, however, that precautions are still necessary as monkeys and bats are sold live throughout the region.

Traders said demand has dwindled because of Ebola, with sales for many dropping from about 100 animals a day to about 20.

“Kinshasa and Brazzaville told us to stop sending monkeys and bats,” said another trader in Mbandaka, Willy Taban, who said his business has been cut in half in recent weeks. He was referring to buyers in the capital of the nearby Republic of Congo, which is across the river from Kinshasa.

 

Congo’s health minister, Dr. Oly Ilunga Kalenga, said there are no plans to ban sales of bush meat in the province since bush meat is not the primary way the Ebola virus spreads. Instead, the government is focusing on good hygiene practices such as hand-washing, he said.

 

Health officials are also tracking down anyone who had close contact with anyone infected by the virus, offering an experimental vaccine and promoting safe burials and other practices. Such health efforts can be challenging in communities where many people consider Ebola to be witchcraft. Others are skeptical that the disease exists, even though this is the Central African country’s ninth outbreak.

One Mbandaka trader, Gamo Louambo, said he’s still shipping 100 wild animals to Kinshasa daily and said he won’t stop eating them as they’re his main source of food. “I don’t see Ebola. It isn’t here,” he said.

In West Africa, where there had never been an outbreak before 2014, getting people to accept that Ebola was a real disease was key, said WHO’s Jonathan Polonsky.

For those in Kinshasa, “Ebola is very far away,” said Defede Mbale, immigration chief at the capital’s port of Maluku.

Pointing to a poster of safe Ebola practices on his desk, he said the government has provided extra resources to patrol the river and take people’s temperatures as they arrive by boats, checking for fevers.

He doesn’t doubt the deadly virus exists, but Mbale said there’s only so much that he’s willing to change.

 

“We have our customs and they won’t change because of Ebola,” he said. “We’ll eat all foods.”
…