The eruption of Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano could intensify in the coming weeks, possibly spraying boulders, rocks and ash for miles around, the U.S. Geological Survey said Wednesday.

Kilauea, one of the world’s most active volcanoes, erupted last week. Lava flows from fissures on its eastern flank have destroyed at least 36 homes and other buildings and forced the evacuation of about 2,000 residents.

The USGS said the risk would rise if the lava dropped below the groundwater level beneath the summit’s caldera.  An influx of water inside could cause steam-driven explosions. 

The agency said more violent eruptions could send “ballistic rocks” weighing up to a ton for about a kilometer or smaller ones much farther. 

The emergence of two new vents prompted Hawaii County to issue a cellphone alert ordering stragglers in two communities on the volcano’s eastern flank to get out immediately. Police followed up with personal visits.

Both communities are in a forested, remote part of the Big Island on the eastern flank of Kilauea, which has been erupting continuously since 1983. 

In recent years, the volcano has mostly released lava in hard-to-reach areas inside a national park or along the coastline. But last week, vents popped open and released lava, gas and steam inside neighborhoods.   

There’s no indication when the eruption might stop, or how far the lava might spread.
…

The 104-year-old scientist who has traveled to Switzerland to end his life hopes that his highly publicized move will change the way people think of euthanasia. 

Australian ecologist David Goodall is scheduled to die Thursday at an end-of-life clinic in Basel.

Goodall does not have a terminal illness but says his quality of life has deteriorated significantly in recent years.

“One should be free to choose the death, when death is at an appropriate time,” Goodall told dozens of journalists at a news conference Wednesday in Basel.

“My abilities have been in decline over the past year or two, my eyesight over the past six years. I no longer want to continue life. I’m happy to have the chance tomorrow to end it,” said the centenarian, wearing a pullover emblazoned with the words “Aging Disgracefully.”

Goodall is one of hundreds of people from around the world who travel to Switzerland each year in hopes of ending their lives.

The Swiss federal statistics office says the number of assisted suicides has been growing fast: Nine years ago, there were 297. By 2015, the most recent year tabulated, the figure had more than tripled to 965. Nearly 15 percent of the cases last year were people under 65 years old.

Most assisted suicides in Switzerland are done using sodium pentobarbital, according to DIGNITAS, a right-to-die organization.The drug sends the patient into a deep coma and then paralyzes the respiratory system, causing him or her to stop breathing.

Allowed for decades

While assisted suicides are illegal in most countries, it has been allowed in Switzerland since the 1940s, if performed by someone with no direct interest in the death. The Netherlands legalized euthanasia in 2002 for patients considered to be suffering unbearable pain with no cure.

Australia has forbidden such practices, though the state of Victoria became the first to pass a euthanasia bill last November to allow terminally ill patients to end their lives, which would have excluded Goodall. It takes effect in June 2019.

In the United States, assisted suicide is legal in Oregon, Vermont, Washington, California, Colorado, Hawaii and the District of Columbia.

Goodall and other supporters of assisted suicide say other countries should legalize the procedure so people in very poor health as well as those who are ready to die don’t have to travel to Switzerland.

On Wednesday, surprised by the turnout at the news conference, Goodall said he would have preferred to die at his home in Australia. He told reporters that medically assisted suicide should be more widely available and not only viewed as a last resort for the terminally ill.

Goodall told reporters he had no last-minute doubts about his decision. But, the centenarian said he was not without regrets: “There are many things I would like to do, but it’s too late. I’m content to leave them undone.”
…

Medical teams from the World Health Organization arrived in the Democratic Republic of Congo to combat a new Ebola virus outbreak, as government officials in the region put plans in place to contain the outbreak.

The World Health Organization announced Tuesday that DRC is suffering a new outbreak in its Bikoro area in Equateur Province and said it has released $1 million from its emergency fund to support response to the crisis. The announcement came after 17 people died of suspected cases recently and health officials confirmed that at least two of the dead were infected with Ebola.

Nigeria’s Health Minister Isaac Adewole said Wednesday that Nigeria is stepping up its screening of visitors from DRC and will consider sending health teams to Congo help manage the outbreak.

The WHO said it is deploying epidemiologists, clinicians and infection prevention and control experts to DRC.

The last Ebola outbreak in DRC was in 2017 in Likati Health Zone, when 4 of 8 infected people died. This is the ninth Ebola outbreak since the virus was discovered in 1976 and named for a local river, the Ebola.

None of the Ebola outbreaks in DRC were connected to the massive outbreak that took place recently in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. It lasted from 2014 to 2016 and killed more than 11,000 people. The WHO was criticized for its slow response to that outbreak.

The Ebola virus can transfer from monkeys and bats to humans, among whom it can spread rapidly. In many cases, the hemorrhagic fever resulting from the Ebola infection is fatal.

A new, experimental vaccine has been shown to be effective against the virus, although supplies are limited.
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A team of veterinarians has again traveled to southern Malawi to vaccinate thousands of dogs as part of a global effort by the British charity, Mission Rabies, to eradicate the deadly virus by 2030. Malawi has in the past reported elevated numbers of child deaths from rabies, but now three years into this initiative, the organizers say they are seeing signs of progress. Lameck Masina reports for VOA from Blantyre.
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Top executives of the nation’s leading wholesale drug distributors told Congress under oath Tuesday that their companies didn’t help cause the nation’s deadly opioid epidemic, drawing bipartisan wrath that included one lawmaker suggesting prison terms for some company officials.

 

The confrontation came at a House subcommittee hearing at which legislators asked why huge numbers of potentially addictive prescription opioid pills had been shipped to West Virginia, among the states hardest hit by the drug crisis. Lawmakers are making an election-year push for legislation aimed at curbing a growing epidemic that saw nearly 64,000 people die last year from drug overdoses, two-thirds from opioids.

 

Company officials’ responses ranged from apologies to explanations to finger-pointing at doctors who prescribe the drugs, pharmacies that fill prescriptions and the federal Drug Enforcement Administration for not doing enough as overseer of sales of legally controlled substances.

In a scene that recalled Congress’ 1994 grilling of tobacco industry officials, House Energy and Commerce investigations subcommittee Chairman Gregg Harper, R-Miss., administered oaths to the heads of five pharmaceutical distributors and asked each if “the actions you or your company took contributed to the opioid epidemic.”

 

Answering no were the leaders of the nation’s three biggest distribution firms: McKesson Corp., Cardinal Health Inc. and AmerisourceBergen Corp., which dominate the U.S. market. The only yes came from Joseph Mastandrea, chief of the smaller Miami-Luken Inc., while the former chief of H.D. Smith Wholesale Drug Company also said no.

 

The denials drew an angry response from GOP Rep. David McKinley of West Virginia, where federal figures show 884 people died from drug overdoses in 2016. That gives the state the nation’s highest overdose death rate — 52 out of 100,000 people. Other states with high death rates included Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, plus Washington, D.C.

 

“The fury inside me right now is bubbling over,” said McKinley. He said he found the denial of responsibility “particularly offensive” and he wondered aloud about the proper punishment.

 

“Just a slap on the wrist, some financial penalty?” he asked. “Or should there be time spent for participation in this? I just want you to feel shame.”

 

Members of both parties accused company officials of missing signs of suspicious activity. The government requires distributors of controlled substances to report suspicious drug orders to the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and to deny questionable transactions.

 

The committee’s investigation has found that distributors sent more than 780 million pills of hydrocodone and oxycodone — prescription pain-killers that have caused many deaths — to West Virginia from 2007 to 2012. Around 1.8 million people live in the state.

 

Investigators said 20.8 million opioid pills were shipped from 2006 to 2016 to Williamson, population 2,900. One pharmacy in Kermit, with around 400 residents, ranked 22nd in the U.S. in the number of hydrocodone pills it received in 2006, according to the investigation.

“Was it the profit motive” that prompted them to continue making dubious sales, asked Rep. Cathy Kastor, D-Fla.

 

The corporate executives said they’ve improved their detection systems — a promise lawmakers said they’d heard before. The officials also acknowledged responsibility for fixing the problem but said that was divided with others, too. Nearly 12 million people misused opioids in 2016, according to federal figures.

 

“It’s a shared responsibility among many different players: physicians, pharmacists, state medical boards, state pharmacy boards, DEA” for solving the problem, said Mastandrea.

 

In some cases, they apologized.

 

“To the people of West Virginia, I want to express my personal regrets for judgments that we’d make differently today,” said George Barrett, executive board chairman of Cardinal Health.

The Trump administration and lawmakers of both parties have been drawing attention to opioids, a range of pain-killing drugs that can be addictive when misused. They include prescription drugs like hydrocodone, oxycodone and codeine, synthetic opioids like fentanyl that can be made illegally, and illegal drugs like heroin.

 

House and Senate committees have been working on dozens of bills that include encouraging doctors to use non-addictive pain killers, spurring research on such products, broadening access to treatment and giving financial incentives for drug treatment specialists to work in underserved areas.

 

In 1994, tobacco company executives testified before the Energy and Commerce panel, then controlled by Democrats. The officials said they didn’t believe cigarettes were addictive, despite evidence to the contrary.

 

Within four years, the industry reached a settlement to pay states more than $200 billion over 25 years for tobacco-related health care costs.
…

Vaccines designed to prevent infection with human papillomavirus (HPV) are effective in protecting against pre-cancerous cervical lesions in women, particularly in those vaccinated between age 15 and 26, according to a large international evidence review.

The research by scientists at the scientific network the Cochrane Review also found no increase in the risk of serious side effects, with rates of around 7 percent reported by both HPV-vaccinated and control groups.

“This review should reassure people that HPV vaccination is effective,” Jo Morrison, a consultant in gynecological oncology at Britain’s Musgrove Park Hospital, told reporters at a briefing about the review’s findings.

She noted that some campaign groups have expressed concern about HPV vaccines, but said this review had found no evidence to support claims of increased risk of harm.

HPV is one of the common sexually transmitted diseases. Most infections do not cause symptoms and go away on their own, but when the immune system does not clear the virus, persistent HPV infection can cause abnormal cervical cells.

These pre-cancerous lesions can progress to cervical cancer if left untreated. HPV is a leading cause of cancer deaths among women worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.

Drugmakers GlaxoSmithKline and Merck make vaccines that protect against HPV.

The Cochrane research pooled data and results from 26 studies involving more than 73,000 women across all continents over the last eight years.

The researchers found that in young women who tested negative for HPV, vaccination reduced the risk of developing precancer. About 164 out of every 10,000 women who got placebo developed cervical pre-cancerous lesions, compared with two out of every 10,000 who were vaccinated.

Looking more broadly across all women in the studies, regardless of whether they had previously had HPV or not, the vaccines were found to be slightly less effective, but still reduced the risk of cervical precancer from 559 per 10,000 to 391 per 10,000.

Experts not directly involved in the review said its findings were robust and important.

“This intensive and rigorous Cochrane analysis … provides reassuring and solid evidence of the safety of these vaccines in young women,” said Margaret Stanley, a specialist in the pathology department at Cambridge University. “It reinforces the evidence that preventing infection by vaccination in young women … reduces cervical precancers dramatically.”
…

A 104-year-old British-born Australian scientist who is planning to kill himself on Thursday says he doesn’t think the drugs used for assisted suicide should be available to just anyone, but that doctors should be able to prescribe them.

In an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press just two days before he plans to take advantage of Switzerland’s assisted-suicide laws, David Goodall spoke of his determination to end his life. He also talked about his disbelief in the afterlife, his childhood after being born the year World War I began and his family, who lives across three continents.

Goodall, described by the right-to-die group Exit International as its first member, said he’s been contemplating the idea of suicide for about 20 years, but only started thinking about if for himself after his quality of life deteriorated over the last year. He cited a lack of mobility, doctor’s restrictions and an Australian law prohibiting him from taking his own life among his complaints, but he is not ill.

Goodall, a botanist, said he tried clumsily to take his life himself at least three times — and then finally decided to get professional help. He has been looking to draw attention to his desire to end his life in hopes that countries like Australia change their laws to be more accepting of assisted suicide.

Hundreds of people — some far more frail than Goodall, who uses a wheelchair — travel to Switzerland every year to take their lives. The best-known group to help foreigners end their days in the Alpine country is Dignitas, but others include Life Circle in Basel — Goodall’s choice.

Goodall has a libertarian bent but he knows that some religious people — which he is not — might take exception to not letting nature take its course.

“If people for religious purposes interfere with the free will of other people, I think that’s most regrettable. By all means, let them follow their own choice in respect to the end of life, but don’t impose it on other people,” he said from his hotel room near Basel’s Spalentor tower gate.

Doctors say Goodall plans to take his life with an injection of the barbiturate pentobarbitol, a chemical often used as an anesthetic but which is lethal at excessive doses. Those who take their lives through assisted suicide in Switzerland often get injections 15 times greater than that of typical medical doses for anesthesia, said Dr. Christian Weber, a Swiss anesthesiologist who will help set up Goodall for his suicide on Thursday.

Goodall said after reaching middle age, people should be allowed to decide themselves whether to use medicine to take their own lives.

“I wouldn’t suggest that it’s available to everyone, and just going and buying it off the shelf,” he said. “I think there are plenty of people who might misuse that. But I would accept that it should be done by doctors’ prescription — but they should be free to prescribe.”

 
…

At least 17 people have died in an area of northwestern Democratic Republic of Congo where health officials have now confirmed an outbreak of Ebola, the health ministry said on Tuesday.

It is the ninth time Ebola has been recorded in the central African nation, whose eastern Ebola river gave the deadly virus its name when it was discovered there in the 1970s, and comes less than a year after its last outbreak which killed eight people.

“Our country is facing another epidemic of the Ebola virus, which constitutes an international public health emergency,” the ministry said in a statement.

“We still dispose of the well trained human resources that were able to rapidly control previous epidemics,” it said.

Ebola is believed to be spread over long distances by bats, which can host the virus without dying, as it infects other animals it shares trees with such as monkeys. It often spreads to humans via infected bushmeat.

Before the outbreak was confirmed, local health officials reported 21 patients showing signs of hemorrhagic fever around the village of Ikoko Impenge, near the town of Bikoro. Seventeen of those later died.

Medical teams supported by the World Health Organization and medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres were dispatched to the zone on Saturday and took five samples from suspected active cases.

Two of those samples tested positive for the Zaire strain of the Ebola virus, the ministry said.

“Since notification of the cases on May 3, no deaths have been reported either among the hospitalized cases or the healthcare personnel,” the statement said.

After Congo’s last Ebola flare-up, authorities there approved the use of a new experimental vaccine but in the end did not deploy it owing to logistical challenges and the relatively minor nature of the outbreak.

The worst Ebola epidemic in history ended in West Africa just two years ago after killing more than 11,300 people and infected some 28,600 as it rolled through Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Despite regular outbreaks every few years, death tolls in Congo have been significantly lower.

“Our top priority is to get to Bikoro to work alongside the Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and partners to reduce the loss of life and suffering related to this new Ebola virus disease outbreak,” said Dr. Peter Salama, WHO Deputy Director-General, Emergency Preparedness and Response.

“Working with partners and responding early and in a coordinated way will be vital to containing this deadly disease.”

Health experts credit an awareness of the disease among the population and local medical staff’s experience treating for past successes containing its spread.

Congo’s vast, remote geography also gives it an advantage, as outbreaks are often localized and relatively easy to isolate.

Ikoko Impenge and Bikoro, however, lie not far from the banks of the Congo River, an essential waterway for transport and commerce.

Further downstream the river flows past Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital Kinshasa and Brazzaville, capital of neighboring Congo Republic – two cities with a combined population of over 12 million people.
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As the pre-monsoon summer heat takes hold in New Delhi, two things are as inevitable as 40-degree-Celsius days: power cuts and air pollution from the diesel generators that then kick in.

But a team of Indian engineers has figured out away to bring some good from choking generator exhaust: They are capturing it and turning it into ink.

“The alarming thing about diesel generators is they are located in the heart of densely populated areas. It’s spitting smoke right there,” said Kushagra Srivastava, one of the three engineers who developed the technology, now installed in Gurgaon, a satellite city of New Delhi, and in the southern city of Chennai.

The idea, Srivastava said, came about when he and his co-founders stopped at a sugarcane juice stall on a hot day.

They noticed a wall that had turned black behind the stand’s diesel generator, where exhaust emerged from a pipe.

They wondered if diesel exhaust might be used to produce paint — and set out to try.

The device they came up with, which attaches to generators, captures 90 percent of the soot particles from cooled diesel exhaust. The material can then be sold to ink manufacturers.

Their company, Chakr Innovation, has so far installed 50 of the devices for government firms such as Indian Oil, real estate developers and other state government offices, earning more than 11 million rupees ($200,000) in revenue in the first year, Srivastava said.

The company has plans to install another 50 devices over the coming year, he said. It has so far sold 500 kg of collected soot, which has been used to create 20,000 liters of ink, he added.

Chakr Innovations is not the first start-up to see cash in diesel exhaust. A competitor called Graviky Labs, based in Bangalore, is using similar technology to turn diesel exhaust from vehicles into ink.

Choking Air

Srivastava and his co-inventors Arpit Dhupar and Prateek Sachan see themselves as part of a movement towards cleaner air and energy in a country where major cities struggle with choking air.

About 1.1 million people a year die from the impacts of air pollution in India, according to a 2015 survey by the U.S.-based Health Effects Institute. That is about a quarter of the total number of air pollution deaths worldwide, it said.

In New Delhi, levels of the most dangerous particles in the air are sometimes 10 times higher than the safe limit, the survey noted.

Srivastava and Dhupar both grew up in New Delhi, which the World Health Organization in 2014 declared the most polluted city in the world. Sachan comes from Allahabad, the third most polluted city in WHO’s 2016 rankings.

“Earlier I remember there were a lot less cars on the road, there was a lot less congestion, and a lot more greenery,” said Dhupar, Chakr’s chief technology officer.

But as trees were felled and roads widened to accommodate more cars, Dhupar — then in high school — developed chronic respiratory problems. Doctors put him on medication and warned him to stop playing sports.

“My problem is, whenever I start to run out of air, the anxiety levels shoot up,” he said.

Dhupar said many of his family and friends have also developed long-term respiratory issues.

Diesel exhaust contributed to just 2 percent of all air pollution deaths in India in 2015, according to the Health Effects Institute.

But in “confined spaces” in urban areas, where many generators are used, it represents a larger risk, said Pankaj Sadavarte, one of the report’s researchers.

Action in New Delhi

India has in place policies to monitor and restrict air pollution, but they can be difficult to enforce, experts say.

Worries about air pollution are growing, however. Last November, the capital launched its first air quality emergency action plan during a particularly hazardous week when pollution spiked.

The government halted construction within the city, raised parking fees to discourage driving and shut schools to keep children indoors.

The national Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change is drafting a national policy to clean India’s air, though its release has been delayed, said Sunil Dahiya, a senior campaigner with Greenpeace India.

“The air pollution debate and health debate is picking up in India,” Dahiya said in a telephone interview. “That momentum is forcing the policymakers to make our cities more livable.”
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Polar bears and other iconic animals could be extinct by the end of the century if ocean temperatures continue to rise at the current rate, marine biologists warned Monday.

Warming temperatures caused by climate-changing emissions may result in a catastrophic loss of marine wildlife and drastic changes to ocean food webs by 2100, scientists at the Florida Institute of Technology and the University of North Carolina said in a paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Ocean temperatures on rise

Much current marine life will be unable to tolerate ocean temperatures that are projected to increase by 2.8 degrees Celsius on average, according to the study.

“With warming of this magnitude, we expect to lose many, if not most, animal species from marine protected areas by the turn of the century,” said the study’s lead author, John Bruno, a biologist at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Marine protected areas, established as sanctuaries for polar bears, coral reefs and other wildlife threatened by human activities such as fishing and oil extraction, have failed to protect species from the impacts of global warming, the scientists said.

In Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, a large number of corals already have been destroyed by bleaching and diseases related to higher temperatures, the study noted.

Poles are most at risk

The protections in place will be ineffective by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at the current rate, researchers said.

Reduced oxygen concentrations in the ocean — one consequence of global warming — will make marine protected areas uninhabitable to most species, they argued.

Richard Aronson, a co-author of the study and head of the department of ocean engineering and marine sciences at Florida Tech, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that wildlife in the Arctic and Antarctic is particularly at risk.

“Oceanic warming is happening most rapidly at the poles. Warming will threaten polar ecosystems generally, including iconic wildlife like polar bears and penguins,” he said in an email.

Oceans absorb gases

Around 90 percent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases is absorbed by oceans, Aronson said.

“We have to take bold steps individually and as a society to control emissions. Shifting away from our dependence on fossil fuels would be a major step in the right direction,” he said.

“Stabilizing emissions over the next few decades could cut the rate of warming in half,” he added.
…

Hawaii’s Kilauea is not your typical blow-the-top-off kind of volcano.

It’s been simmering and bubbling for about 35 years, sending superhot lava spewing up through cracks in the ground. This month’s eruptions are more of the same, except the lava is destroying houses miles from the summit.

Scientists on Monday said there’s been a slight decrease in the pressure that forces lava to the surface, but it’s likely a temporary lull. Dennison University volcanologist Erik Klemetti said similar eruptions at Kilauea have simmered for years.

“It’s going to take some time before you can say for sure whether things are winding down,” he said.

Nonstop eruptions

Kilauea is the youngest and most active of the five volcanoes on the Big Island. It’s been erupting continuously since 1983, but not the way most people think, not like Mount St. Helens in 1980, spewing straight up and everywhere.

A couple of miles below Kilauea is a constantly fed “hot spot” of superhot molten rock from deep inside Earth. It needs to find a way out.

And rather than exploding, at Kilauea “you get an oozing of lava at the surface,” explained U.S. Geological Survey volcano hazards coordinator Charles Mandeville.

The molten rock is called magma when it is underground; when it reaches the surface, it is called lava. The lava flows out through cracks in the ground, usually within the confines at the national park that surrounds Kilauea. But this time the eruptions are destroying homes.

“This kind of eruption that is occurring now is very normal for this volcano,” said volcanologist Janine Krippner of Concord University in West Virginia. “It’s really that it’s just impacting people.”

What happened this time

The past week or so has seen “a major readjustment with the volcano’s plumbing system,” Mandeville said.

On April 30, scientists got their first sign something was up. The floor of the summit’s lava pool had a “catastrophic failure,” forcing the magma east, looking for ways out, Mandeville said. That created a series of small earthquakes.

The magma escaped in “fire fountains” of lava shooting as high as 230 feet (70 meters) out of cracks, Mandeville said. The first one of those happened last Thursday, followed by at least nine more since then.

“You don’t know where the next fissure is going to open up,” he said.

What’s next

While there’s been a slight decrease in pressure, scientists won’t know for certain if Kilauea has calmed down for at least two months, according to Mandeville. He said it could be much longer before conditions are safe for people to be in the area east of the volcano’s summit. Officials have told some 1,700 residents to leave their homes.

The lava is 2,200 degrees (1,200 degrees Celsius), Mandeville said.

“It literally incinerates anything it touches,” he said.

It’s not just the molten rock, but the spewed gases can be dangerous too, Klemetti said. That includes sulfur dioxide, which reacts with water in your lungs and can form acid, he said.

Mandeville said scientists want at least two months of calm before declaring the situation better.

In the meantime, “there’s not much we can do other than get people out of the way,” he said.

Volcanoes make Hawaii

The Hawaiian Islands only exists because of volcanoes. These volcanoes were created from “hot spots” of underground magma, which are mostly but not always underwater. The molten rock erupts on the sea floor, cools and forms a volcano. With each eruption, the volcano grows until it is big enough to push out of the water and form islands.

There are about 13 hot spots like this around the globe, with the islands of Hawaii one of the most active of the bunch.

Nine-tenths of Kilauea’s surface is less than 1,000 years old, which is quite young in geology, Krippner said.

Mandeville said there are 169 active volcanoes in the United States — including underneath Yellowstone — and 1,550 in the world that are above sea level, he said.

We wouldn’t exist without volcanoes, scientists said. Volcanic eruptions provide nutrients, like nitrogen, for soil and their gases, especially water vapor, helped form the atmosphere we now have.

“It provides so much good,” Krippner said, “we just have to get out of their way while they do their thing.”
…

Jeremy Wilson knew it was risky renting a home in an area with the highest hazard level for lava flows in Hawaii, but it was all he could afford for his family of six.

Now, with magma spewing from cracks in the earth above and below his 3-bedroom home, he fears it could join the 26 other houses destroyed since the eruption of the nearby Kilauea volcano on Thursday, according to Hawaii County Civil Defense.

“I’m a renter but everything we own is in that house,” said Wilson, a 36-year-old social worker, who moved to the Leilani Estates subdivision four years ago and is among 1,700 residents who have evacuated since the eruption.

The semi-rural wooded area, with dirt roads and many homemade “off the grid” houses, is a landing pad for newcomers to Hawaii’s Big Island who cannot afford real-estate prices elsewhere.

“If you want to live in Hawaii, it’s really your only option,” said Wilson, who has been staying with friends along with his two children, wife, mother-in-law and uncle since they were forced to flee.

Keeping prices low in Leilani Estates is the “Zone 1” (out of nine) hazard rating for lava-flows the U.S. Geological Survey gives the area due to “vents that have been repeatedly active in historical time.”

Reminder of 1955 event

Geologists say this week’s activity is beginning to look like an event in 1955 in which eruptions continued for 88 days in the area and covered around 4,000 acres with lava, though few people lived there back then. More recently in 2014, lava threatened the nearby Puna district and the town of Pahoa.

Jessica Gauthier, 47, a realtor in Leilani Estates, said the eruption of Kilauea, about 12 miles (19 km) distant, was a reality check for new residents.

“People move here thinking it’s paradise, and what they learn is that it’s something different,” said Gauthier. Eruptions of lava and toxic sulfur dioxide gas continued within the subdivision, and larger aftershocks from Friday’s 6.9 magnitude earthquake were expected, the observatory said.

A lava flow advanced about a mile from one of ten vents that have opened. As the lava finds a preferred route, some vents are expected to close, putting pressure on others and shooting magma up to 1,000 feet (305 m) into the air. On Saturday it reached heights of 230 feet.

Some residents saw eruptions as inevitable and said if Pele, the Hawaiian volcano goddess, wanted the land back, then she would take it.

‘No stranger to disasters’

Wilson, who grew up in Springfield, Missouri, was less philosophical. He has been trying to rescue his possessions before they are torched.

He was forced back on Sunday when he saw smoke coming from cracks in the road on the approach to his house.

“I’m from Tornado Alley. So I’m no stranger to disasters, but this is something else,” said Wilson. “This is crazy.”
…

Dogs can be trained to sniff out drugs and explosives, so Mark Ruefenacht wondered if their exquisite sense of smell could be used to detect changes in a diabetic’s blood sugar level.

A near fatal episode prompted the forensic scientist, who’s had diabetes for most of his adult life, to ask that question. In 1999, while he was training a puppy to be a guide dog for the blind, his blood sugar suddenly dropped to a dangerously low level.

“More than likely, I had a seizure, from the low blood sugar,” Ruefenacht recalled, as he explained how the puppy kept trying to rouse him. “And he stuck with me and I was able to get my blood sugar up.”

That incident made him wonder if dogs could be trained to detect the inherent chemical changes that accompany a drop in blood sugar, called hypoglycemia, then alert their owners.    

Dogs4Diabetics

Ruefenacht worked with scientists and funded research which determined that the “smell” of hypoglycemia shows up in both breath and sweat. He also worked with and studied professionals who train dogs to sniff out everything from explosives to cancer. And most important of all, Ruefenacht started training a fun-loving yellow Labrador retriever named Armstrong to alert him when he was having a dangerously low blood sugar. The training proved so successful, Armstrong is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the first diabetes-detection dog.

Sitting under a poster of Armstrong, who died in 2012, Ruefenacht recalls that those early successes led some organizations to offer him large sums of money for the rights to his discoveries.  Ruefenacht says he turned those opportunities down. Instead, in 2004, he founded Dogs4Diabetics. 

He says properly training a diabetes detection dog and its owner can cost $50,000.  The organization raises money to cover these expenses, then provides the dogs at no cost to people who qualify.

The smell of hypoglycemia

The dogs are trained to identify the scent of hypoglycemia on a reliable and consistent basis. Ruefenacht uses jars containing swabs of sweat from a diabetic who had low blood sugar, randomly mixed with jars of other distracting smells, such as peanut butter, dog food and eucalyputus.  The dogs are rewarded when they select the correct jar. This “sweat jar” method for training diabetes alert dogs has been validated scientifically.

The next step is to teach them to alert their owner. The dogs are trained to use subtle signals, but if those go unnoticed, to put their paws on his lap, or balance on their back legs and put their front paws on his shoulders. They learn to snuffle at his nose and mouth, lick his face and bark.  And if all else fails, they’re trained to get someone else to come and help.

Ruefenacht says the dogs are often aware of blood sugar drops long before electronic monitoring systems send a warning alarm.

Dogs4Diabetics has placed more than 100 dogs with diabetics.  They hope to expand the program – training humanity’s most loyal companion to save lives and help diabetics around the world.  
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Diabetics who use insulin to control their blood sugars can sometimes end up with very low readings that, if left untreated, can lead to death. While modern blood sugar monitoring systems can warn patients when their blood sugar levels are dangerously low, there is another, more “user-friendly” way to do the same thing. Shelley Schlender reports.
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The first vaccine campaign against cholera in Yemen has started, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday, a year and a half after an epidemic was triggered by war and a health and sanitation crisis.

There have since been more than one million suspected cases of cholera in Yemen, and 2,275 recorded deaths, the WHO says.

The disease is spread by feces in sewage contaminating water or food, and it can kill because patients quickly lose fluids through vomiting and diarrhea. Caught early it can be treated with oral rehydration salts.

The oral vaccination campaign, which began in four districts in Aden on Sunday targeting 350,000 people, coincides with the rainy season, which health workers fear could spread the disease further.

“The first four districts are being targeted… and then the campaign will move towards all the areas at risk in the country, covering at least four million people,” Lorenzo Pizzoli, WHO cholera expert, said in a tweet posted on Sunday.

Yemen’s war, a proxy conflict between Iran-aligned Houthis and the internationally recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, which is backed by a Saudi-led alliance, has killed more than 10,000 people since 2015.

It has also displaced more than 2 million and destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure, including the health system whose workers have not been paid.

Nevio Zagaria, the WHO representative in Yemen, told Reuters in April that some 1.4 million vaccine doses had been shipped via Nairobi, out of 4.4 million planned.

“The rainy season is starting, so we need to use the window of opportunity to start a vaccination campaign,” he said at the time.

In July 2017, the International Coordinating Group on Vaccine Provision – which manages a global stockpile — earmarked one million cholera vaccines for Yemen. But the WHO and local authorities together to scrap a vaccination plan on logistical and technical grounds.

Some senior Houthi health officials have been known to object to vaccinations, delaying the campaign, aid workers say.
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Globally, more cases of cancer are reported in men than in women. A recent study in India reveals that the reverse is true there. Published in the medical journal Lancet, the study reports that Indian women not only have a higher rate of cancer, they are also afflicted by it at a younger age compared with their counterparts in developed Western countries. Ritul Joshi reports from New Delhi.
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An innovative consumer awareness campaign will be launched this summer in several cities in the United States. The campaign is aimed at preventing the waste of food that costs the world billions of dollars and has severe consequences on global food security and the environment. Verónica Balderas Iglesias spoke with experts.
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A powerful Atlas 5 rocket was poised for liftoff early Saturday from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, carrying to Mars the first robotic NASA lander designed entirely for exploring the deep interior of the red planet.

The Mars InSight probe was scheduled to blast off from the central California coast at 4:05 a.m. PDT (1105 GMT), creating a luminous predawn spectacle of the first U.S. interplanetary spacecraft to be launched over the Pacific.

The lander will be carried aloft for NASA and its Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) atop a two-stage, 19-story Atlas 5 rocket from the fleet of United Launch Alliance, a partnership of Lockheed Martin Corp and Boeing Co.

The payload will be released about 90 minutes after launch on a 301-million-mile (484 million km) flight to Mars. It is scheduled to reach its destination in six months, landing on a broad, smooth plain close to the planet’s equator called the Elysium Planitia.

InSight’s mission

That will put InSight roughly 373 miles (600 km) from the 2012 landing site of the car-sized Mars rover Curiosity. The new 800-pound (360-kg) spacecraft marks the 21st U.S.-launched Martian exploration, dating to the Mariner fly-by missions of the 1960s. Nearly two dozen other Mars missions have been launched by other nations.

Once settled, the solar-powered InSight will spend two years, about one Martian year, plumbing the depths of the planet’s interior for clues to how Mars took form and, by extension, the origins of the Earth and other rocky planets.

Measuring marsquakes

InSight’s primary instrument is a French-built seismometer, designed to detect the slightest vibrations from “marsquakes” around the planet. The device, to be placed on the surface by the lander’s robot arm, is so sensitive it can measure a seismic wave just one-half the radius of a hydrogen atom.

Scientists expect to see a dozen to 100 marsquakes over the course of the mission, producing data to help them deduce the depth, density and composition of the planet’s core, the rocky mantle surrounding it and the outermost layer, the crust.

The Viking probes of the mid-1970s were equipped with seismometers, too, but they were bolted to the top of the landers, a design that proved largely ineffective.

Apollo missions to the moon brought seismometers to the lunar surface as well, detecting thousands of moonquakes and meteorite impacts. But InSight is expected to yield the first meaningful data on planetary seismic tremors beyond Earth.

Insight also will be fitted with a German-made drill to burrow as much as 16 feet (5 meters) underground, pulling behind it a rope-like thermal probe to measure heat flowing from inside the planet. 

Meanwhile, a special transmitter on the lander will send radio signals back to Earth, tracking Mars’ subtle rotational wobble to reveal the size of the planet’s core and possibly whether it remains molten.

Hitching a ride aboard the same rocket that launches InSight will be a pair of miniature satellites called CubeSats, which will fly to Mars on their own paths behind the lander in a first deep-space test of that technology.
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Peanuts are the most common cause of fatal food-induced anaphylaxis, or severe allergic reaction. But British scientists have found a better way to monitor a significant food hazard by developing a more accurate blood test, and it’s five times cheaper than the existing one. VOA’s Mariama Diallo reports.
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Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and heavy rains can cause large amounts of rock and soil to collapse under their own weight and tumble down a slope. These landslides can crush everything in their path. Aided by sophisticated satellites, scientists are creating a comprehensive catalogue of landslide-prone areas, hoping it will help affected communities predict when and where they might happen. VOA’s George Putic has more.
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A small amount of radioactive, weapons-grade plutonium about the size of a U.S. quarter is missing from an Idaho university that was using it for research, leading federal officials on Friday to propose an $8,500 fine.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Idaho State University can’t account for about a 30th of an ounce (1 gram) of the material that’s used in nuclear reactors and to make nuclear bombs.

The amount is too small to make a nuclear bomb, agency spokesman Victor Dricks said, but could be used to make a dirty bomb to spread radioactive contamination.

“The NRC has very rigorous controls for the use and storage of radioactive materials as evidenced by this enforcement action,” he said of the proposed fine for failing to keep track of the material. 

Dr. Cornelis Van der Schyf, vice president for research at the university, blamed partially completed paperwork from 15 years ago as the school tried to dispose of the plutonium.

“Unfortunately, because there was a lack of sufficient historical records to demonstrate the disposal pathway employed in 2003, the source in question had to be listed as missing,” he said in a statement to The Associated Press. “The radioactive source in question poses no direct health issue or risk to public safety.”

Idaho State University has a nuclear engineering program and works with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, considered the nation’s primary nuclear research lab and located about 65 miles (105 kilometers) northwest of the school.

The plutonium was being used to develop ways to ensure nuclear waste containers weren’t leaking and to find ways to detect radioactive material being illegally brought into the U.S. following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the school said in an email to the AP.

The university, which has 30 days to dispute the proposed fine, reported the plutonium missing on Oct. 13, according to documents released by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The agency said a school employee doing a routine inventory discovered the university could only account for 13 of its 14 plutonium sources, each weighing about the same small amount.

The school searched documents and found records from 2003 and 2004 saying the material was on campus and awaiting disposal. However, there were no documents saying the plutonium had been properly disposed.

The last document mentioning the plutonium is dated Nov. 23, 2003. It said the Idaho National Laboratory didn’t want the plutonium and the school’s technical safety office had it “pending disposal of the next waste shipment.”

The school also reviewed documents on waste barrels there and others transferred off campus since 2003, and opened and examined some of them. Finally, officials searched the campus but didn’t find the plutonium. 

The nuclear commission said senior university officials planned to return the school’s remaining plutonium to the Energy Department. It’s not clear if that has happened. 

Energy Department officials didn’t return calls seeking comment Friday. 

Dricks, the commission spokesman, said returning the plutonium was part of the school’s plan to reduce its inventory of radioactive material.

He said overall it has “a good record with the NRC.”
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The Kilauea volcano sent more lava into Hawaii communities Friday, a day after forcing more than 1,500 people to flee from their mountainside homes, and authorities detected high levels of sulfur gas that could threaten the elderly and people with breathing problems.

After a week of earthquakes and warnings, the eruption that began Thursday threw lava into the sky from a crack in a road and sent another line of molten rock snaking through a forest. On Friday, the activity continued, with reports of lava spurting from volcanic vents on two streets. Areas downhill from the vents were at risk of being covered up.

The community of Leilani Estates near the town of Pahoa on the Big Island appeared to be in the greatest danger. Authorities also ordered an evacuation of Lanipuna Gardens, a smaller, more rural subdivision directly to the east. But scientists said new vents could form, and it was impossible to know where.

Civil defense officials cautioned the public about high levels of sulfur dioxide near the volcano and urged vulnerable people to leave immediately. Exposure to the gas can cause irritation or burns, sore throats, runny noses, burning eyes and coughing.

Maija Stenback began to get nervous when she noticed cracks in the streets near her home. On Thursday, she shot video of the lava as it bubbled and splattered across a street about six blocks from her house.

“You can feel it all the way into the core of your being,” she said. “It’s just that roaring and unbelievable power of the lava bubbling up and spitting up into the air.”

Stenback, her daughter and grandchildren packed as much as they could into their car. The two kids were each allowed to select three toys to take before the family left for a friend’s home about a 30-minute drive away.

“I have lived through a lot of lava flows here, but never this close before,” Stenback said.

There were no immediate reports of injuries, but at least 100 people were staying in shelters Friday, with many more evacuees believed to be with relatives and friends.

The Hawaii governor activated the National Guard to help with evacuations and provide security to about 770 structures in Leilani Estates and 130 lots in Lanipuna Gardens left empty when residents sought shelter.

Kilauea has erupted periodically for decades, and scientists said they have no way of predicting how long the eruption will continue.

A key factor will be whether a magma reservoir at the summit starts to drain in response to the eruption, which has not happened yet, said Asta Miklius, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory.

“There is quite a bit of magma in the system.  It won’t be just an hours-long eruption probably, but how long it will last will depend on whether the summit magma reservoir gets involved. And so we are watching that very, very closely,” Miklius said.

County, state and federal officials had been warning residents all week that they should be prepared to evacuate because an eruption would give little warning.

The geological survey on Thursday raised the volcano’s alert level to warning status, the highest possible, meaning a hazardous eruption was imminent, underway or expected.

Henry Calio said the first sign that something might be wrong happened when cracks emerged in the driveway of his home in Leilani Estates. His wife, Stella, then received a call from an official who told them to get out immediately.

The two feared they might lose their house.

“This is our retirement dream,” Henry Calio said.

Kilauea’s Puu Oo crater floor began to collapse Monday, triggering the earthquakes and pushing the lava into new underground chambers. The collapse caused magma to push more than 10 miles (16 kilometers) downslope toward the populated southeast coastline of the island.

The magma later crossed under Highway 130, which leads to a popular volcano access point. Civil defense authorities closed the area to visitors and ordered private tour companies to stop taking people into the region.

Over the decades, most of Kilauea’s activity has been nonexplosive, but a 1924 eruption spewed ash and 10-ton (9-metric ton) rocks into the sky and killed one person.

A 1983 eruption resulted in lava fountains soaring over 1,500 feet (457 meters) into the sky. Since then, the lava flow has buried dozens of square miles of land and destroyed many homes.
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Adults and children should consume a maximum of 10 percent of their daily calories in the form of saturated fat such as meat and butter and one percent from trans fats to reduce the risk of heart disease, the World Health Organization said Friday.

The draft recommendations, the first since 2002, are aimed at reducing non-communicable diseases, led by cardiovascular diseases, blamed for 72 percent of the 54.7 million estimated deaths worldwide every year, many before the age of 70.

“Dietary saturated fatty acids and trans-fatty acids are of particular concern because high levels of intake are correlated with increased risk of cardiovascular diseases,” Dr. Francesco Branca, Director of WHO’s Department of Nutrition for Health and Development, told reporters.

The dietary recommendations are based on scientific evidence developed in the last 15 years, he added.

The United Nations agency has invited public comments until June 1 on the recommendations, which it expects to finalize by year-end.

Saturated fat is found in foods from animal sources such as butter, cow’s milk, meat, salmon and egg yolks, and in some plant-derived products such as chocolate, cocoa butter, coconut, palm and palm kernel oils.

An active adult needs about 2,500 calories per day, Branca said.

“So we are talking about 250 calories coming from saturated fat and that is approximately a bit less than 30 grams of saturated fat,” he said.

That amount of fat could be found in 50 grams (1.76 oz) of butter, 130-150 grams of cheese with 30 percent fat, a liter of full fat milk, or 50 grams of palm oil, he said.

Trans fats

Trans fats occur naturally in meat and dairy products. But the predominant source is industrially-produced and contained in baked and fried foods such as fries and doughnuts, snacks, and partially hydrogenated cooking oils and fats often used by restaurants and street vendors.

In explicit new advice, WHO said that excessive amounts of saturated fat and trans fat should be replaced by polyunsaturated fats, such as fish, canola and olive oils.

“Reduced intake of saturated fatty acids have been associated with a significant reduction in risk of coronary heart disease when replaced with polyunsaturated fatty acids or carbohydrates from whole grains,” it said.

Total fat consumption should not exceed 30 percent of total energy intake to avoid unhealthy weight gain, it added.

The recommendations complement other WHO guidelines including limiting intake of free sugars and sodium.
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NASA’s next Mars explorer is going to have company all the way to the red planet: a couple of puny yet groundbreaking sidekicks.

Named after the characters in the 2008 animated movie, the small satellites WALL-E and EVE are hitching a ride on the Atlas V rocket set to launch early Saturday morning from California with the Mars InSight lander.

Similar in size to a briefcase or large cereal box, the satellites with pop out from the rocket’s upper stage following liftoff and hightail it to Mars, right behind InSight.

It will be the first time little cube-shaped satellites, CubeSats as they’re known, set sail for deep space. The journey will span 6 1/2 months and 300 million miles (485 million kilometers).

A brief look at the $18.5 million experiment tagging along with InSight:

Mini sats

Miniature satellites, or CubeSats, have been piggybacking on big-ticket space missions for well over a decade, providing relatively cheap and fast access to orbit for students and other out-of-the-mainstream experimenters. Until now, the hundreds of CubeSats have been confined to Earth orbit. That’s about to change with NASA’s Mars Cube One project, or MarCO.

The European Space Agency, meanwhile, has its CubeSat sights on the moon. A recent competition yielded two winning proposals: a CubeSat to explore the moon’s far side from lunar orbit, another to probe a permanently shadowed crater near the moon’s south pole, also from lunar orbit. NASA is also looking to send CubeSats to the moon, as well as an asteroid.

Movie connection

It turns out that these twin cubes are equipped with the same type of cold gas propulsion system used in fire extinguishers to spray foam. The movie WALL-E uses a fire extinguisher to propel through space. Team members couldn’t resist the connection, thus the names WALL-E and EVE for the two mini spacecraft. Engineers want to test this compact propulsion system for guiding the 30-pound (13.6-kilogram) cubes to Mars.

Getting to Mars

Once free from the rocket’s upper stage following liftoff, WALL-E and EVE will trail a few thousand miles (kilometers) behind InSight en route to Mars. The two mini spacecraft will also be a few thousand miles (kilometers) apart from one another. That’s to prevent any collisions or even close calls. While that may seem far apart, it’s actually fairly close by space standards, according to Brian Clement, an engineer on the project at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

While InSight will be stopping at Mars on November 26, WALL-E and EVE will zoom past the planet from about 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) out. Don’t expect any Thunderbird pilot-theatrics as the cubes fly by, like a tilting of the solar wings in salute. “That would make a great movie, but that’s definitely not the way we’re going to do it,” Clement said.

Extra ears

Besides testing the cubes’ maneuvering system, NASA wants to see if WALL-E and EVE can transmit data to Earth from InSight during its descent to Mars. If the experiment succeeds, it should take just several minutes for flight controllers to hear from the cubes. No worries if they’re silent. NASA will rely on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter already circling the planet as the main communication link with InSight during descent and touchdown. It will take a lot longer, though, to get confirmation. The beauty of a CubeSat relay system is that it could provide descent information at planets and other cosmic stop-offs lacking established communications.

Post-Mars

Once past Mars, WALL-E and EVE will remain in an elliptical orbit around the sun, together for years to come. But they won’t work for long. Once they run out of fuel, they won’t be able to point their solar wings toward the sun for recharging.

The Associated Press Health & Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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