Congo’s latest Ebola outbreak now has 14 confirmed cases as health officials rush to contain the often deadly virus in a city of more than 1 million.

The World Health Organization was holding an experts’ meeting Friday to determine whether the epidemic warrants being declared a global health emergency. It now calls the risk to the public in Congo “very high” and the regional risk “high.” The Republic of Congo and Central African Republic are nearby.

Vast, impoverished Congo has contained several past Ebola outbreaks but the spread of the hemorrhagic fever to an urban area poses a major challenge. The city of Mbandaka, which has one confirmed Ebola case, is an hour’s flight from the capital, Kinshasa, and is on the Congo River, a busy travel corridor.

“The outbreak is potentially a public health emergency because many of the criteria have been met,” said Dr. David Heymann, a former WHO director who has led numerous responses to Ebola. 

For a health crisis to constitute a global health emergency it must meet three criteria stipulated by WHO: It must threaten other countries via the international spread of disease, it must be a “serious, unusual or unexpected” situation and it may require immediate international action for containment. 

Tests vaccine

Ebola has twice made it to Congo’s capital in the past and was rapidly stopped. Congo has had the most Ebola outbreaks of any country, and Heymann said authorities there have considerable expertise in halting the lethal virus. 

The latest outbreak tests the new experimental Ebola vaccine, which proved highly effective in the West Africa outbreak a few years ago, although the vaccine was used long after the epidemic had peaked. More than 4,000 doses have arrived in Congo this week, with more on the way. One challenge will be keeping the vaccine cold in a region with poor infrastructure and patchy electricity.

One Ebola death in the current outbreak has been confirmed so far. Congo’s health ministry late Thursday said the total number of cases is 45, including 10 suspected and 21 probable ones.

The health ministry said two new deaths have been tied to the cases, including one in a suburb of Mbandaka. The other was in Bikoro, the rural area where the outbreak was announced last week. It is about 150 kilometers (93 miles) from Mbandaka.

​Game changer

“This is a major, major game-changer in the outbreak,” Dr. Peter Salama, WHO’s emergency response chief, warned on Thursday after the first urban case was announced. “Urban Ebola can result in an exponential increase in cases in a way that rural Ebola struggles to do.”

Until now, the outbreak had been confined to remote rural areas, where Ebola, which is spread via contact with bodily fluids of those infected, travels more slowly.

Doctors Without Borders said 514 people believed to have been in contact with infected people were being monitored. WHO said it was deploying about 30 more experts to Mbandaka.

This is the ninth Ebola outbreak in Congo since 1976, when the disease was first identified. The virus is initially transmitted to people from wild animals, including bats and monkeys.

There is no specific treatment for Ebola. Symptoms include fever, vomiting, diarrhea, muscle pain and at times internal and external bleeding. The virus can be fatal in up to 90 percent of cases, depending on the strain.
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Researchers at New York University College of Dentistry are taking a new approach to quickly identifying Zika and other infections. As Faith Lapidus reports, unlike currently available tests, the approach does not involve drawing blood.
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Deteriorating security is forcing Afghanistan to spend more money on trauma care, rather than investing in women and children’s health, its health minister said Thursday.

The government has come under increasing pressure over rising violence, with a string of attacks this year causing hundreds of casualties in the capital, Kabul, alone.

“The concern is that nowadays, suicide bombings and armed conflict is the third (highest) cause of deaths and disability in Afghanistan,” Ferozuddin Feroz told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview in London. “Instead of focusing on maternal health, on nutritional status, we will spend it on trauma.”

Health care gains

Afghanistan’s health system is rudimentary, battered by decades of war and conflict. About 60 percent of the population has access to health services, defined as being within one hour’s walking distance, Feroz said.

Feroz, who is a trained doctor and has advised other countries on health system reform, aims to increase this to 75 percent by the end of 2018.

Afghanistan has made gains in maternal health, with 400 deaths per 100,000 live births, up from 1,600 per 100,000 in 2002, according to the United Nations Population Fund, but it is still one of the worst rates in the world.

“Maintaining these achievements during an increasing security situation is really a challenge,” Feroz said. “If we maintain the current rate of funding, that also would help us to maintain what we have achieved.”

Feroz was in London to meet with researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which is providing his ministry with technical support to develop a basic health care package with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
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Interstellar space is mostly a vacuum, so there is no medium that can carry sound. In other words, space is totally silent. But astronomers have often associated the movement of heavenly bodies with music. With the help of modern technology, one astronomer has turned the signals from the Milky Way into a funky tune.

“It was an idea that I had for a long time,” said University of Massachusetts Astronomy Research Professor Mark Heyer, “and only recently has some of the technology come about that somebody like me could access that.”

The visible light coming from distant worlds carries a lot of information that can be analyzed with a spectroscope. Heyer developed a computer program, or algorithm, to convert the movement of large clouds of atoms and molecules of different elements and compounds, into music.

“I take the spectrum and I, essentially, mathematically resample that to a musical scale and that gives that spectrum, which is inherently atonal, it gives it the tonality. And that is what really is the key stuff to make it sound nice,” he said.

Heyer randomly assigned different musical instruments to different gases, forming a combination consisting of a saxophone, a piano, an upright bass and some percussion woodblocks. For instance, a certain atomic gas, which fills much of the space between the stars, is represented by the upright bass.

“It gives you that driving pulse, I think, that drives the music forward. And the woodblocks sort of do that as well,” he said.

After some experimenting, Heyer decided to use the pentatonic minor blues scale.

“I was experimenting with the algorithm and I had major scales and simple minor scales, but when I first played the available segment of just one of the instruments, it sounded like that could be a very nice blues or jazzy sound to it,” he said. “So, I recrafted the algorithm so it could transform the data into a musical blues scale.”

Heyer says he was surprised when he realized for the first time that the rotation of our galaxy contains a rhythm — and that funky blues seemed to fit perfectly.
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The World Health Organization reports one confirmed case of the deadly Ebola virus in the city of Mbandaka, a city of more than one million 150 kilometers from Bikoro where the outbreak started.

WHO says as of May 15, 44 cases of Ebola have been reported in the DRC and more than 20 people have died. Except for the confirmed case in Mdbandaka, the other cases have been in Bikoro, a remote, northwestern area that is very hard to reach.

The Ebola virus is endemic in Congo, and despite Congo’s experience with the disease, the difference between this one and previous outbreaks is the location.

Bikoro lies near two major rivers that could transport infected people to urban areas including Kinshasa and Brazzaville. Mbandaka is also on the Congo River about 4,000 kilometers north of Kinshasa, the capital of the DRC, whose population is roughly ten million.

Dr. Peter Salama, WHO deputy director-general for emergency preparedness and response, called this latest news “a game changer.”

WHO’s regional director for Africa said WHO and its partners, including Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, are working to rapidly scale up the search for all contacts of the confirmed case in Mbandaka as well as those in Bikoro. The WHO is holding an emergency meeting Friday to evaluate the situation.

The speed of the WHO’s involvement and those of its partners is one of the major differences between this Ebola outbreak and the one that ravaged West Africa between 2014 and 2016.

And, despite the arrival of Ebola in an urban area, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General said “we now have better tools than ever before to combat Ebola. WHO and our partners are taking decisive action to stop further spread of the virus.”

Tedros led a delegation to the DRC May 13 that included Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO Regional Director for Africa, and Salama. They met with Congolese President Joseph Kabila and the country’s minister of health to evaluate the response and determine the next steps in stopping the virus.

Stephen Morrison, Director of the Global Health Policy Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, conducted research on the West African outbreak that claimed more than 11,000 lives and is carefully watching the current outbreak in a rural area in the northeast of the DRC.

“I thought it was very commendable and a great sign of the change of outlook that Dr. Tedros was personally there on the ground, and that was very important,” Morrison said. “It rallies the troops, it shows determination and commitment and speed.”

One of the changes from the 2014 outbreak is that the WHO has an emergency fund to get experts and materials in place. The first batch of an experimental vaccine, which proved to be safe and effective at the end of the epidemic in West Africa, has already arrived in Congo. It will be administered to health care workers and those exposed to the virus in just days.

Merck, the pharmaceutical company that makes the vaccine, has promised to supply however much is needed for this outbreak. The vaccine is not licensed, and some argue that since it works, it is no longer experimental.

A multidisciplinary team has been in Bikoro, where the outbreak first occurred since May 10. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also has personnel in place. In addition, the World Food Program is providing an air bridge to get the vaccine and supplies to the affected region with several flights a day. Treatment centers that isolate the sick are operational, as are hand washing stations containing a solution of bleach and water to kill the virus.

Morrison said what is unfolding in Central Africa “shows a lot of learning and a different pattern of response.”

In 2014, it took more than six months for the international community to address that outbreak. By then, it was already spreading in the three impoverished West African countries.

Another difference: Ebola was unknown in West Africa in 2014. This is the ninth Ebola outbreak in the DRC since 1974, when the country was named Zaire and the virus was named after the Ebola River near the source of the outbreak.

Morrison says the response to this outbreak shows no complacency.

“We are very concerned,” added Salama. “And we are planning for all scenarios, including the worst case scenario.” In the massive Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone in West Africa, the virus entered the capital cities in all three countries.

In Congo, the government, WHO and others are working to make sure, if at all possible, this doesn’t happen.
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The deadly Ebola virus has broken out in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but things are very different this time in the speed of response and tools available for this outbreak versus the one that hit West Africa in 2014-2016. For one, the World Health Organization is already involved.

Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director of the WHO, led a delegation to the DRC May 13 that included Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, the WHO regional director for Africa, and Dr. Peter Salama, WHO deputy director-general for emergency preparedness and response. Tedros and the others went to personally evaluate the response to the country’s Ebola outbreak and meet with President Joseph Kabila and the country’s minister of health.

Stephen Morrison, director of the Global Health Policy Center at a Washington research organization, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, conducted research on the West African outbreak that claimed more than 11,000 lives and is carefully watching the current outbreak in a rural area of northeast DRC.

“I thought it was very commendable and a great sign of the change of outlook that Dr. Tedros was personally there on the ground, and that was very important,” Morrison said. “It rallies the troops, it shows determination and commitment and speed.”

​Rapid response

One of the changes from the 2014 outbreak is that the WHO has an emergency fund to get experts in place to start to contain the outbreak. 

A team left Wednesday for the country’s rural northwest. The first batch of experimental Ebola vaccines arrived in the Democratic Republic of Congo May 16 and will be administered to health care workers and those exposed to the virus in days. Merck, the pharmaceutical giant that makes the vaccine, has promised the WHO to supply whatever is needed for this outbreak. Although the vaccine is not licensed, and therefore is called “experimental,” it was proved safe and effective in West Africa.

A multidisciplinary team, including WHO experts and staff from Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), has been in Bikoro, where the outbreak first occurred May 10. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also has personnel in place. In addition, the World Food Program is providing an air bridge to get the vaccine and supplies to the affected region with several flights a day. Treatment centers that isolate the sick are in place, as are hand-washing stations containing a solution of bleach and water to kill the virus.

‘A lot of learning’

Morrison said what is unfolding in Central Africa “shows a lot of learning and a different pattern of response. The response to this outbreak has been quite different from a very delayed response over a six month period in 2014 in the outbreak in West Africa.” 

That, and that this is the ninth Ebola outbreak in the DRC since 1974, when the country was named Zaire and the virus was named after the Ebola River, near the source of the outbreak. Morrison points out that Congo has a lot of experience in dealing with outbreaks of Ebola, but Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia in West Africa hadn’t experienced Ebola until 2014. The international response was slow, and more than 11,000 people died as a result.

Morrison says a lot of lessons were learned from that epidemic. Even though the virus is in a remote, rural area, no one involved is complacent. 

“We are very concerned, and we are planning for all scenarios, including the worst case scenario,” Dr. Salama said.

In that scenario, the virus could travel to heavily populated urban areas and get out of control. Bikoro is on a lake that feeds into rivers that connect to Kinshasa, Brazzaville and other major cities. In Congo the government, WHO and others are working to make sure, if at all possible, this doesn’t happen.
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The deadly Ebola virus has been confirmed in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A team of experts left Wednesday to visit the country’s rural northwest to help prevent its spread. VOA’s Carol Pearson reports on what’s different about the outbreak in Congo and the epidemic that swept through West Africa four years ago.
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U.S. birth rates declined last year for women in their teens, 20s and — surprisingly — their 30s, leading to the fewest babies in 30 years, according to a government report released Thursday.

Experts said several factors may be combining to drive the declines, including shifting attitudes about motherhood and changing immigration patterns. 

The provisional report, based on a review of more than 99 percent of the birth certificates filed nationwide, counted 3.853 million births last year. That’s the lowest tally since 1987.

Births have been declining since 2014, but 2017 saw the greatest year-to-year drop, about 92,000 less than the previous year.

That was surprising, because baby booms often parallel economic booms, and last year was a period of low unemployment and a growing economy. 

What’s causing this?

But other factors are likely at play, experts said.

One may be shifting attitudes about motherhood among millennials, who are in their prime child-bearing years right now. They may be more inclined to put off child-bearing or have fewer children, researchers said.

Another may be changes in the immigrant population, who generate nearly a quarter of the babies born in the U.S. each year. For example, Asians are making up a larger proportion of immigrants, and they have typically had fewer children than other immigrant groups.

Also, use of IUDs and other long-acting forms of contraception has been increasing.

Other findings

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report also found: 

The rate of births to women ages 15 to 44, known as the general fertility rate, sank to a record low of about 60 per 1,000.  

 
Women in their early 40s were the only group with higher birth rates in 2017, up 2 percent from the year. The rate has been rising since the early 1980s. 

 
The cesarean section rate rose by a tiny amount after having decreased four years. Studies have shown C-sections are more common in first-time births involving older moms. 

 
Rates of preterm and low birth weight babies rose for the third straight year, possibly for the same reason. 

 
Birth rates for teens continued to nosedive, as they have since the early 1990s. In 2017, they dropped 7 percent from the year before. 

 
Rates for women in their 20s continued to fall and hit record lows. They fell 4 percent. 

 
Perhaps most surprising, birth rates for women in their 30s fell slightly, dipping 2 percent for women ages 30 to 34 and 1 percent for women 35 to 39.

 
Birth rates for women in their 30s had been rising steadily to the highest levels in at least half a century, and women in their early 30s recently became the age group that has the most babies. That decline caused some experts’ eyebrows to shoot up, but they also noted the dip was very small. 

“It’s difficult to say yet whether it marks a fundamental change or it’s just a blip,” said Hans-Peter Kohler, a University of Pennsylvania demographer who studies birth trends.

Generation can’t replace itself 

Another notable finding: The current generation is getting further away from having enough children to replace itself.

The U.S. once was among a handful of developed countries with a fertility rate that ensured each generation had enough children to replace it.

The rate in the U.S. now stands less than the standard benchmark for replacement. It’s still above countries such as Spain, Greece, Japan and Italy, but the gap appears to be closing. 

A decade ago, the estimated rate was 2.1 kids per U.S. woman. In 2017, it fell below 1.8, hitting its lowest level since 1978. 

“That’s a pretty remarkable decline,” said Dr. John Santelli, a Columbia University professor of population and family health and pediatrics.
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Whenever the all-female Nigerian biker group D’Angels hits the streets, people would stare in amazement at the sight of women on motorbikes. So they made up their minds to use the attention for a good cause.

Enter the Female Bikers Initiative (FBI), which has provided free breast and cervical cancer screening to 500 women in Nigeria’s commercial capital Lagos.

This August, D’Angels and another female biker group in Lagos, Amazon Motorcycle Club, plan to provide free screening to 5,000 women, a significant undertaking in a country where many lack access to proper health care.

“What touched us most was the women,” D’Angels co-founder Nnenna Samuila, 39, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone from Lagos.

“Some asked if the bikes really belonged to us. Some asked if they could sit on our bikes. We decided to use the opportunity to do something to touch women’s lives.”

Major killers

Breast and cervical cancer are huge killers in Nigeria, accounting for half the 100,000 cancer deaths each year, according to the World Health Organization. Screening and early detection can dramatically reduce the mortality rate for cervical cancer in particular.

But oncologist Omolola Salako, whose Lagos charity partnered with the FBI last year, says there is not enough awareness of the need for screening.

“Among the 600-plus women we have screened since October, about 60 percent were being screened for the first time,” said Salako, executive director of Sebeccly Cancer Care. “It was the first time they were hearing about it.”

Even if women do know they should be screened, affordability is a barrier, said Salako, whose charity provides the service for free and also raises funds to treat cancer patients.

Raising awareness

This year the bikers will put on a week of awareness-raising and mobile screening, after which free screenings will be available at Sebeccly every Thursday for the rest of the year.

Members of the two clubs and any other female bikers who want to join in will ride through the streets, to schools, malls and other public places, distributing fliers and talking to women about the importance of screening.

“All the bikers turn up,” said Samuila, one of five women on the FBI’s board of trustees. “We just need to tell them, this is the location for the activity, and this is what we need you to do.”

Last year their funds, from private and corporate donors, could only stretch to two mastectomies, and they hope they will be able to sponsor more treatments this year.

“We encourage this person to come, and then she finds out that something is wrong and you abandon her,” said Samuila, a former telecoms executive who now runs her own confectionery and coffee company. “We would love to be able to follow up with whatever comes out of the testing.”

This is just the latest in a number of projects the bikers have organized.

In 2016 they launched Beyond Limits, a scheme to encourage young girls to fulfill their potential beyond societal expectations of marriage and babies. They travel to schools to give talks and invite senior women working in science, technology and innovation to take part.

Turning point

Samuila formed D’Angels with 37-year-old Jeminat Olumegbon in 2009 after they were denied entry to the established, all-male bikers’ groups in Lagos.

“They didn’t want us. They were like, ‘No, women don’t do this. Women are used to being carried around. Why don’t you guys just be on the sidelines?’ That sort of pissed us off and we then went on to form our own club,” Samuila said.

In 2010, the pair rode from Lagos to the southern city of Port Harcourt to attend a bikers’ event, a 617-km (383-mile) trip that the men had told them was impossible for a woman.

“That was the turning point in our relationship with the male bikers,” Samuila said.

The two-day ride earned them a new respect from the male riders, some of whom now take part in the screening awareness programs themselves.

Bigger challenges

In 2015 Olumegbon, also an FBI board member, took on an even bigger challenge riding 20,000 km through eight West African countries in 30 days to raise funds for children in orphanages.

“I’ve been riding since 2007. At first, I was the only female riding, then I found Nnenna and the other girls,” she said. “Because we started riding, more females decided to look inwards, and decided that they could do so as well.”

The bikers plan to extend their initiative to other parts of Nigeria, and have also received invitations from women riders in other West African countries.

For now though, they want to focus on making sure their efforts reach every woman in Lagos.

“When we speak to people on the streets, many don’t even know of cervical cancer,” Samuila said. “It’s so painful to hear that so many people are dying from the disease when it can be prevented.”
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For some lizards it’s easy being green. It’s in their blood. Six species of lizards in New Guinea bleed lime green thanks to evolution gone weird.

It’s unusual, but there are critters that bleed different colors of the rainbow besides red. The New Guinea lizards’ blood — along with their tongues, muscles and bones — appear green because of incredibly large doses of a green bile pigment. The bile levels are higher than other animals, including people, could survive.

Scientists still don’t know why this happened, but evolution is providing some hints into this nearly 50-year mystery.

By mapping the evolutionary family tree of New Guinea lizards, researchers found that green blood developed inside the amphibians at four independent points in history, likely from a red-blooded ancestor, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Science Advances.

This isn’t a random accident of nature but suggests this trait of green blood gives the lizards an evolutionary advantage of some kind, said Christopher Austin of Louisiana State University.

“Evolution can do amazing things given enough time,” Austin said. “The natural world is a fascinating place.”

Austin first thought that maybe being green and full of bile would make New Guinea lizards taste bad to potential predators.

“I actually ate several lizards myself and they didn’t taste bad,” Austin said. He also fed plenty of them to a paradise kingfisher bird with no ill effects except maybe a fatter bird.

Understanding bile is probably key. Blood cells don’t last forever. After they break down, the iron is recycled for new red blood cells, but toxins are also produced, which is essentially bile.

In the New Guinea lizards, levels of a green bile pigment are 40 times higher than what would be toxic in humans. It’s green enough to overwhelm the color of the red blood cells and turn everything green, Austin said.

In people, elevated green bile pigment levels sometimes kill malaria parasites. Austin thinks that might be why lizards evolved to be green-blooded because malaria is an issue for New Guinea and lizards. It might be the result of evolution trying to kill the malaria parasite in lizards or it might be past lizards were infected so heavily that this was the body’s reaction, he said.

The next step is to search for the specific genes involved.

Michael Oellermann, a researcher at the University of Tasmania in Australia, praised Austin’s work and wondered if there is an evolutionary cost to having green blood.

Otherwise more critters would bleed green or another color, he said.

Many insects, spiders and molluscs have the copper-containing blood pigment that’s clear unless it attaches to oxygen and then it turns blue. Squids and octopuses have intense blue blood. Icefish in Antarctica have clear blood, while little crustaceans from Lake Baikal in Siberia have blood that’s blue or red or green.

Marine worms called lamp shells have violet to pink blood, according to the American Chemical Society.

“Biology is incredibly diverse,” Austin said.
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Many women with a common and aggressive form of breast cancer that is treated with Herceptin can get by with six months of the drug instead of the usual 12, greatly reducing the risk of heart damage it sometimes can cause, a study suggests.

It’s good news, but it comes nearly two decades after the drug first went on the market and many patients have suffered that side effect.    

The study was done in the United Kingdom and funded by UK government grants. Results were released Wednesday by the American Society of Clinical Oncology and will be presented at the group’s meeting next month.

Herceptin transformed care of a dreaded disease when it was approved in 1998 for women with advanced breast cancers whose growth is aided by a faulty HER2 gene, as 15 percent to 20 percent of cases are. It was later approved for treatment of those cancers in earlier stages, too, based on studies that had tested it in patients for 12 months. That guess, that the drug should be taken for a year, became the standard of care.

But the drug can hurt the heart’s ability to pump. That often eases if treatment is stopped but the damage can be permanent and lead to heart failure.

Some studies tested shorter use, but results conflicted. The new study is the largest so far, and involved more than 4,000 women with early-stage cancers who were given usual chemotherapy plus Herceptin for either six or 12 months.   

After four years, about 90 percent of both groups were alive without signs of the disease. Only 4 percent on the shorter treatment dropped out due to heart problems versus 8 percent of those treated for a year.

“It’s great news” for patients, said the study leader, Dr. Helena Earl of the University of Cambridge in England. Earl has consulted for Herceptin’s maker, Roche. The company had no role in the study.

Compelling findings

“There’s no reason to not immediately change practice. The findings are persuasive,” said Dr. Richard Schilsky, chief medical officer for the oncology society. Most of Herceptin’s cancer-fighting benefit seems to come in the early months of use, he said.

Others said that because so few women have died or relapsed after being treated with the drug, longer followup may be needed to make sure the findings hold up before guidelines should be changed.  Doctors also want to see results published, and to study them to see if certain groups of women need longer treatment.

Herceptin is given through an IV every three weeks; a year of it costs $34,000 to $40,000 in England and about $70,000 in the U.S. In December, a copycat competitor known as a biosimilar was approved in the U.S. and already is used in some other countries.

Dr. Harold Burstein, a breast cancer expert at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, said shorter treatment may increase access to the drug in countries where many women can’t afford it now, but that in the U.S., “my guess is that people will continue to aim for a year of treatment” because of lingering concerns that longer use is better, as a smaller, previous study suggested.

Dr. Jennifer Litton, a breast specialist at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said Herceptin was a true breakthrough, but scaling back treatment whenever possible is just as important to patients. She said the results show how important it can be to study drugs already on the market, and that drug companies alone should not be relied on to do studies like this.

 “It’s really important that we continue to have public funding for trials so we can continue to ask all of these questions for our patients,” she said.   

Herceptin’s developer, Genentech, now part of Roche, said in a statement that the new study must be viewed along with several smaller previous ones that found one year to be best. The goal of treatment “is to provide people with the best chance for a cure,” so women need to talk with their doctors about how best to reach that goal, the statement says.

Earlier this year, the American Heart Association issued its first statement on the heart effects of cancer drugs, saying women should consider carefully the risks and benefits of any therapies that may hurt hearts.

 
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Patients suffering from opioid addiction may soon be given the first non-opioid drug to help them handle withdrawal symptoms. 

The Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday approved use of the drug Lucemyra, saying it gives doctors a new option for treating the side effects of withdrawal.

“We know that the physical symptoms of opioid withdrawal can be one of the biggest barriers for patients seeking help and ultimately overcoming addiction,” FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said. “The fear of experiencing withdrawal symptoms often prevents those suffering from opioid addiction from seeking help.”

Those symptoms include anxiety, muscle aches, sweating, vomiting and a craving for drugs.

Opioids are synthetic painkillers generally prescribed by doctors or used in hospital emergency rooms. But they can become highly addictive, even after the original injury has healed.

Doctors usually treat addiction by substituting one opioid for another, then gradually reducing use or transitioning to other drugs.

Part of long-term plan

Lucemyra is an oral treatment and can be used for only 14 days. The FDA said Lucemyra is not a treatment for opioid addiction but can be used as part of a long-term plan to fight the problem.

Last year, President Donald Trump declared the opioid epidemic a national public health emergency. 

Despite public pronouncements on the need to cut back on opioid prescriptions and to punish drug dealers more harshly, administration critics said they have yet to see any concrete plans from the White House to battle the crisis.
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Something strange is happening with a now-banned chemical that eats away at Earth’s protective ozone layer: Scientists say there’s more of it — not less — going into the atmosphere and they don’t know where it is coming from.

When a hole in the ozone formed over Antarctica, countries around the world in 1987 agreed to phase out several types of ozone-depleting chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Production was banned, emissions fell and the hole slowly shrank.

But starting in 2013, emissions of the second most common kind started rising, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature . The chemical, called CFC11, was used for making foam, degreasing stains and for refrigeration.

“It’s the most surprising and unexpected observation I’ve made in my 27 years” of measurements, said study lead author Stephen Montzka, a research chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

“Emissions today are about the same as it was nearly 20 years ago,” he said.

Countries have reported close to zero emissions of the chemical since 2006 but the study found about 14,300 tons (13,000 metric tons) a year has been released since 2013. Some seeps out of foam and buildings and machines, but scientists say what they’re seeing is much more than that.

Measurements from a dozen monitors around the world suggest the emissions are coming from somewhere around China, Mongolia and the Koreas, according to the study. The chemical can be a byproduct in other chemical manufacturing, but it is supposed to be captured and recycled.

Either someone’s making the banned compound or it’s sloppy byproducts that haven’t been reported as required, Montzka said.

An outside expert, Ross Salawitch, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Maryland, is less diplomatic. He calls it “rogue production,” adding that if it continues “the recovery of the ozone layer would be threatened.”

High in the atmosphere, ozone shields Earth from ultraviolet rays that cause skin cancer, crop damage and other problems.

Nature removes 2 percent of the CFC11 out of the air each year, so concentrations of the chemical in the atmosphere are still falling, but at a slower rate because of the new emissions, Montzka said. The chemical stays in the air for about 50 years.
…

The first batch of 4,000 experimental Ebola vaccines to combat an outbreak suspected of killing 23 people arrived in Congo’s capital Kinshasa on Wednesday.

The Health Ministry said vaccinations would start at the weekend, the first time the vaccine would come into use since it was developed two years ago.

The vaccine, developed by Merck and sent from Europe by the World Health Organization, is still not licensed but proved effective during limited trials in West Africa in the biggest ever outbreak of Ebola, which killed 11,300 people in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone from 2014-2016.

Health officials hope they can use it to contain the latest outbreak in northwest Democratic Republic of Congo.

8,000 doses needed

Peter Salama, WHO’s deputy director-general for emergency preparedness and response, said the current number of cases stood at 42, with 23 deaths attributed to the outbreak.

“Our current estimate is we need to vaccinate around 8,000 people, so we are sending 8,000 doses in two lots,” he told Reuters in Geneva.

“Over the next few days we will be reassessing the projected numbers of cases that we might have and then if we need to bring in more vaccine we will do so in a very short notice.”

Health workers have recorded confirmed, probable and suspected cases of Ebola in three health zones of Congo’s Equateur province, and have identified 432 people who may have had contact with the disease.

WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic said the supplies sent to Congo included more than 300 body bags for safe burials in affected communities. The vaccine will be reserved for people suspected of coming into contact with the disease, as well as health workers.

“In our experience, for each confirmed case of Ebola there are about 100-150 contacts and contacts of contacts eligible for vaccination,” Jasarevic said. “So it means this first shipment would be probably enough for around 25-26 rings — each around one confirmed case.”

Storage temperature 

The vaccine is complicated to use, requiring storage at a temperature between -60 and -80 degrees Celsius.

“It is extremely difficult to do that as you can imagine in a country with very poor infrastructures,” Salama said.

“The other issue is, we are now tracing more than 4,000 contacts of patients and they have spread out all over the region of northwest Congo, so they have to be followed up and the only way to reach them is motorcycles.”

The outbreak was first spotted in the Bikoro zone, which has 31 of the cases and 274 contacts. There have also been eight cases and 115 contacts in Iboko health zone.

The WHO is worried about the disease reaching the city of Mbandaka with a population of about 1 million people, which would make the outbreak far harder to tackle. Two brothers in Mbandaka who recently stayed in Bikoro for funerals are probable cases, with samples awaiting laboratory confirmation.

The WHO report said 1,500 sets of personal protective equipment and an emergency sanitary kit sufficient for 10,000 people for three months were being put in place.
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Most U.S. insurance companies have not adapted their strategies to address the dangers of climate change, making them likely to raise rates or deny coverage in high-risk areas, said a study released Tuesday.

With predictions of an above-average Atlantic hurricane season approaching, thousands of people could be unable to afford insurance protection or lose it altogether, said the Canadian research study published in the British Journal of Management.

Scientific consensus holds that climate change increases the intensity and frequency of extreme weather, from hurricanes to flooding. Last year, three record hurricanes struck the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, causing billions of dollars’ worth of damage.

Yet insurance and reinsurance companies overwhelmingly continue to treat storms as “anomalous rather than correlated to climate change,” the study said.

“Insurers that ignore climate change will not put away enough money to cover their claims. To recoup those losses, they’ll have to raise rates or pull coverage from high-risk areas,” said lead author Jason Thistlethwaite, an assistant professor of environment and business at the University of Waterloo.

They will face whopping payouts associated with disasters, he said.

So long, coverage

“When this shift happens, thousands of people will lose coverage or it will be unaffordable,” he said.

Insured losses hit an all-time high between 2004 and 2014, according to a 2015 analysis by reinsurer Swiss Re.

Insurance companies use reinsurance to minimize their risk. 

But in 2015, only 3 percent out of a sample of 178 U.S. property insurers and reinsurers were taking into account climate change in corporate governance, underwriting and investment, the study found.

However, the number of companies factoring in climate change in at least one area of operation doubled to about three dozen from 2012 to 2015, it said.

With storm-related payouts soaring, insurance companies may go out of business or lose investors, Thistlethwaite said.

A shrinking insurance market will drive up costs to consumers, he said.

The researchers analyzed insurers in California, Connecticut, Minnesota, New York, Washington and New Mexico.

Less than a month away, the Atlantic hurricane season has been predicted to be “above average” by Colorado State University meteorologists. The season runs from June 1 to November 30.
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Poland’s environment minister has decided to stop the extensive logging in one of Europe’s oldest forests that has been declared illegal by a top European Union court, authorities said Tuesday.

Environment Minister Henryk Kowalczyk has ordered the government’s 2017 permission for the increased felling of trees in the Bialowieza Forest to be halted by the top forestry official, a move expected this week.

It was the Polish government’s official reaction to a ruling last month by the European Court of Justice that said the increased logging was against EU environmental laws. Poland has vowed to abide by the ruling.

Environmentalists have welcomed the move, but also urged the waiving of a 2016 decision by then-minister Jan Szyszko that laid the ground for increasing the logging in Bialowieza.

“This is a step in the right direction, but we are waiting also for the other annulment” that should close the matter, said Agata Szafraniuk of ClientEarth.

She said that the logging in one of Europe’s last pristine forests has stopped.

The logging was ordered by Szyszko, who argued it was to stop a bark beetle infestation. Environmentalists questioned that, suspecting profit motives.      

 
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California has become the first U.S. state to require solar installations on most new homes, by the year 2020.  Mike O’Sullivan reports that the state is leading a national effort to reduce carbon emissions as Washington adopts less ambitious goals.
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For the first time, the World Health Organization is taking steps to eliminate a substance that leads to a non-communicable disease: heart disease.

The World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced a plan Monday to eliminate trans fat from the global food supply by 2023. 

Trans fat raises LDL, the “bad” type of cholesterol, and increases the risk of heart disease and stroke. Trans fat also reduces the amount of HDL, the “good” cholesterol that protects your heart. 

Trans fat is artificially made. Liquid vegetable oils are processed with hydrogen to produce a solid fat, like stick margarine or ghee, which is frequently used in south Asian cooking. Trans fat is often present in snack foods like potato chips, baked foods, crackers and fried foods.

The advantages of trans fat is that it is cheap, lasts longer than natural oils, can be heated and reheated over and over again, and it’s almost ideal for making baked goods. “Almost” because it can kill you.

WHO estimates that every year consumption of trans fat leads to more than 500,000 deaths from cardiovascular disease.

At his announcement at WHO headquarters in Geneva Monday, Ghebreyesus asked, “Why should our children have such an unsafe ingredient in their foods?” 

Several high-income countries have virtually eliminated industrially produced trans fat through legally imposed limits on the amount that can be contained in packaged food. 

Denmark, the first country to do it, saw a marked decline in deaths from cardiovascular disease. Then other countries followed Denmark’s lead. About 40 countries currently have laws banning trans fat.

Dr. Tom Frieden, former head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, joined Ghebreyesus at the rollout of the WHO program. Frieden now heads a nonprofit called “Resolve to Save Lives.” He told VOA, “We estimate that if trans fat is eliminated, 17 million lives will be saved over a 25-year period.”

Frieden was behind the initiative to get trans fat banned in New York City, prior to joining the CDC, when he was the city’s health commissioner. 

“Trans fat is tasteless. It’s solid at room temperature, but it’s also solid at body temperature in your coronary arteries,” he said. “Trans fat is an unnecessary toxic chemical that kills, and there’s no reason people around the world should continue to be exposed.”

Frieden also said it is easy and inexpensive to replace trans fats with healthier oils. 

More than 80 percent of deaths from cardiovascular disease are estimated to occur in low- and middle-income countries, according to a 2014 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. 

The WHO initiative, called REPLACE, calls on countries to implement six strategies.

REview dietary sources of industrially produced trans fats and the landscape for required policy change.

Promote the replacement of industrially produced trans fats with healthier fats and oils.

Legislate or enact regulatory actions to eliminate industrially produced trans fats.

Assess and monitor trans fats content in the food supply and changes in trans fat consumption in the population.

Create awareness of the negative health impact of trans fats among policymakers, producers, suppliers and the public.

Enforce compliance of policies and regulations.

Although trans fat is present in cheese and other dairy products and in some meats, the amounts are so small that it is not considered dangerous. 
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A new look at old data is giving scientists a fresh reason to view Europa, a moon of Jupiter, as a leading candidate in the search for life beyond Earth, with evidence of water plumes shooting into space.

A bend in Europa’s magnetic field observed by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft during a 1997 flyby appears to have been caused by a geyser gushing through its frozen crust from a subsurface ocean, researchers who reexamined the Galileo data reported on Monday.

Galileo was passing some 124 miles (200 kilometers) above Europa’s surface when it apparently flew through the plume.

“We know that Europa has a lot of the ingredients necessary for life, certainly for life as we know it. There’s water.

There’s energy. There’s some amount of carbon material. But the habitability of Europa is one of the big questions that we want to understand,” said planetary scientist Elizabeth Turtle of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

“And one of the really exciting things about detection of a plume is that that means there may be ways that the material from the ocean — which is likely the most habitable part of Europa because it’s warmer and it’s protected from the radiation environment by the ice shell — to come out above the ice shell.

And that means we’d be able to sample it,” Turtle told a NASA briefing.

The research, headed by University of Michigan space physicist Xianzhe Jia, was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

The findings support other evidence of plumes from Europa, whose ocean may contain twice the volume of all Earth’s oceans.

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope in 2012 collected ultraviolet data suggestive of a plume.

NASA will get a close-up look from a new spacecraft during its Europa Clipper mission that could launch as soon as June 2022, providing a possible opportunity to sample plumes for signs of life, perhaps microbial, from its ocean.

Europa is considered among the prime candidates for life in our solar system, but is not the only one. For example, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft sampled plumes from Saturn’s ocean-bearing moon Enceladus that contained hydrogen from hydrothermal vents, an environment that may have given rise to life on Earth.

A bit smaller that Earth’s moon, Europa’s ocean resides under an ice layer 10 to 15 miles (15 to 25 km) thick, with an estimated depth of 40 to 100 miles (60 to 150 km).
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Congo has agreed to allow the World Health Organization to use an experimental Ebola vaccine to combat an outbreak announced last week, the WHO director-general said Monday.

The aim is for health officials to start using the vaccine, once it’s shipped, by the end of the week, or next week if there are difficulties, said WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

“We have agreement, registration, plus import permit — everything formally agreed already. And as you know that vaccine is safe and efficacious and has been already tested. So I think we can all be prepared,” he said. “All is ready now, to use it.”

The outbreak was announced last week in Bikoro, in Congo’s northwest. Health officials traveled there after Congo’s Equateur provincial health ministry on May 3 alerted them to 17 deaths from a hemorrhagic fever.

As of May 13, Congo has 39 suspected, probable and confirmed cases of Ebola since April, including 19 deaths, WHO reported. Two cases of Ebola have been confirmed.

Congo’s Ministry of Health has requested that WHO send 4,000 doses of the vaccine, said ministry spokeswoman Jessyca Ilunga, who said they should arrive by the end of the week.

“The vaccination campaign starts next week, everything depends on the logistics because the vaccine must be kept at minus 60 degrees Celsius, and we need to assure that the cold chain is assured from Geneva to Bikoro,” she said.

The Ebola vaccination campaign will first target health workers, Ilunga said. Three nurses are among those with suspected cases, and another is among the dead.

The teams on site have already identified more than 350 contacts, who are people who have had contact with the patients, she said.

Mobile laboratories were deployed to Mbandaka and Bikoro on Saturday, she said, adding that results from the first 12 samples tested with that method should be available tomorrow.

This is the ninth Ebola outbreak in Congo since 1976, when the deadly disease was first identified. Congo has a long track record with Ebola, WHO said. The last outbreak that was announced a year ago, was contained and declared over by July 2017.

None of these outbreaks was connected to the massive outbreak in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone that began in 2014 and left more than 11,300 dead.

There is no specific treatment for Ebola, which is spread through the bodily fluids of people exhibiting symptoms.

The new experimental vaccine, developed by the Canadian government and now licensed to the U.S.-based Merck and has been shown to be highly effective against the virus. It was tested in Guinea in 2015.

Though the Congo outbreak is of a different strain, the experimental vaccine is still thought to be safe and effective.

WHO chief Tedros had led a delegation to the affected region on Sunday.

The Bikoro health zone is about 150 kilometers (93 miles) from Mbandaka, the capital of the Equateur province, and 45 kilometers (28 miles) from Ikoko Impenge, where there are other suspected cases.

WHO is working with Congo’s government and other international organizations, including Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), to strengthen coordination to fight and contain the Ebola outbreak.

 
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Kenya’s government is pushing ahead with a plan to hire 100 Cuban doctors despite opposition from a doctors’ union that says the money could be used to employ local physicians instead.

President Uhuru Kenyatta agreed the deal last year and the plan was accelerated after his state visit to Cuba in March.

But Ouma Oluga, secretary-general of Kenya Medical Practitioners, Pharmacists and Dentists Union (KMPDU), told Reuters the decision is unethical because there are enough doctors locally.

“There are 2,000 Kenyan doctors that require employment and 170 specialists… have not been deployed by the Ministry of health,” he said. “We do not understand why a government would be creating employment for another country and not their own.”

The dispute reflects an attempt by the government to resolve the problem of inadequate healthcare provision that many medical professionals say has been left to fester by successive administrations.

Kenya’s doctor-to-patient ratio is one to 16,000, according to official data, far below a recommendation of the U.N. World Health Organization of one to 1,000.

The government says doctors in far-flung hospitals lack specialized skills, forcing patients to pay to travel to the capital Nairobi or abroad for treatment.

Doctors say they are underpaid and lack equipment. In March, four members of staff at Kenya’s largest referral hospital were suspended for starting brain surgery on the wrong patient.

Last year the government granted doctors a pay rise promised in 2013 after a three-month strike. Oluga said KMPDU will not interfere with the government plan of importing doctors.

“If the Kenyan government wants to bring Cuban doctors, that’s up to them,” he said.

The doctors are expected to arrive in June and each county should get at least two. They will work in a country where medical provision is split between central government and 47 county governments.
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A new global health plan is being rolled out by the World Health Organization, along with a health initiative called Resolve to Save Lives. The goal is to prevent half a million people a year from dying of heart disease. VOA’s Carol Pearson has more.
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Imagine storing digital data in DNA, wearing a device that makes you smarter or creating new materials by manipulating the genes of microbes.

These ideas may sound like science fiction, but scientists are working on technologies that combine what they know about biology and altering it with the help of artificial intelligence. Their work was presented at the 2018 Milken Institute Global Conference during a panel called “Things That Will Blow Your Mind.”

“The machine finds stuff in biology that a human would never find,” Joshua Hoffman, co-founder and chief executive officer of Zymergen, said.

The company is conducting experiments that would never have been possible just a few years ago, Hoffman said.

Manipulating microbial genes

Zymergen uses computers to design experiments that manipulate the genes of microbes so the chemicals they produce can make stronger or better materials.

“We use automation and machine learning to engineer microbes, little single-cell creatures to turn them into the chemical factories of the future,” Hoffman said. “What we’re doing is we’re searching the genome for the things that might work. What machine learning does is it looks for patterns that a human wouldn’t find in ways that are more likely than not to have the genetic changes in the genome that are going to have the impact, the trait that we want.”

He said what takes humans years to discover, computers can do in just months. The bulk of Zymergen’s work is with the chemicals and materials industry as well as with agricultural companies.

“We can work to increase the effectiveness of crop protection agents so herbicides, fungicides, those sorts of things. We can reduce the toxicity of agents that seem to work but actually cause other kinds of problems,” Hoffman added.

Enhancing the human brain

Instead of enhancing microbes, theoretical neuroscientist Vivienne Ming spoke extensively about improving the human brain.

“What I’m interested in is cognitive prosthetics. Can I literally jam something in your brain and make you smarter?” asked Ming, who founded the think tank Socos Labs.

“How much you can think about, pay attention to, mentally operate on at any given moment – we’ve actually found that we can increase that by about 15 percent,” she said.

Laboratories around the world are already conducting research on different types of external noninvasive brain stimulation for autism, to treat depression and to improve the brain’s cognitive abilities.

Ming said one application for improving cognition is to level the playing field for underprivileged children.

“For that hour that they may be spending in a remedial class, we might actually be able to use that technology that brings them right back up with the rest of the kids,” she added.

In a world with artificial intelligence, enhancing cognition is one way for humans to compete with machines, Ming said.

“In a world of increasing technology, this is one possibly to keep us ever relevant is to find the best of who we are and combine it with the best of what we can build in a very deep and fundamental way,” she said.

DNA data storage

Inspired by biology, Hyunjun Park and his company, Catalog, make synthetic DNA used to store digital data.

“We as a society are generating so much data with 5G wireless networks, Internet of Things, high-definition video and just social media so by the year 2025, we’re going to generate a lot more data and a lot more useful data than we’ll have the capacity to store, and so we are in need of a new medium that can be much more efficient than the current solutions,” Park said.

Storage data in the cloud takes up “acres of land, cities worth of power and it costs billions of dollars to build and maintain,” he explained.

In contrast to current forms of data storage, Park said DNA can store much more information that can last thousands of years, and his company has figured out how to do it cheaper than other labs.

“It’s a liquid solution that you move around to assemble different pieces of DNA and then for storage, we will dry that down so that it’s a powder in any tube that you are storing it in,” Park said.

He said an industrial scale proof of concept for DNA storage can be ready as early as 2019.

As scientists from various subfields of biology take advantage of artificial intelligence, investors are paying attention.

“These traditional investors in the Silicon Valley area that’s been invested in tech companies, they are now looking at biotech and seeing this as really the future of innovation,” Park said. 
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Leaders of development agencies say the fight against poverty needs a more aggressive focus on the health and education of the young and vulnerable. NGO and development officials spoke at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles recently, where World Bank President Jim Yong Kim warned social unrest will spread without a business-like approach to philanthropy. Mike O’Sullivan has more from Los Angeles.
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