The U.S. House approved a bill Wednesday that would reverse a federal judge’s order to spill more water from four Pacific Northwest dams to help migrating salmon reach the Pacific Ocean.

The bill, approved 225-189, would prevent any changes in dam operations until 2022. It was sponsored by Republican Reps. Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Dan Newhouse, both of Washington state. 

They say the four Snake River dams provide hydropower, flood control and other benefits while already allowing record salmon runs.

 “We are recognizing the role dams play in the Northwest and that dams and fish can co-exist,” McMorris Rodgers, the fourth-ranking House Republican, said after the vote.

Critics, however, blame the giant dams, built in the 1960s and 1970s, for killing wild salmon, an iconic species in the Northwest. Environmentalists have pushed to remove the dams to aid salmon recovery.

The bill now goes to the Senate.

“I urge my colleagues in the Senate to come forward and support our dams,” Newhouse said.

Once one of the greatest salmon fisheries in the world, the Columbia-Snake river system now has more than a dozen endangered salmon runs.

Democrats have argued that on-going studies of the dams, including whether they should be removed, must go forward.

The four dams — Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose and Lower Granite — span the Snake River between the Washington cities of Pasco and Pullman. Together they produce about 4 percent of the region’s electricity.

Proposals to remove the dams have percolated in the Northwest for decades, and have devolved into a largely partisan issue with Democrats generally on the side of fish and Republicans for keeping the dams.

The government has spent some $15 billion over the decades to increase salmon runs, with mixed results.

In March 2017, U.S. District Judge Michael Simon of Portland, Oregon, ordered the dams to increase spillage beginning this spring. Federal agencies estimated that increasing spill from early April to mid-June would cost ratepayers $40 million in lost power revenues this year.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld Simon’s order.

The dams operate under a plan to protect salmon created by a collaboration of federal agencies, states and Indian tribes during the Obama administration.

Simon found the plan does not do enough. He ruled a new environmental study is needed and it must consider the option of removing the dams. He also wrote that wild salmon were in a “precarious” state.

McMorris Rodgers countered that the number of salmon returning from the ocean to spawn is high.

“We have been in court now for 20 years,” McMorris Rodgers said.

The House bill would delay changes to the 2014 plan for dam operations until 2022, she said.

“The experts … should be the ones deciding how to best manage this system,” Newhouse said. “Not a judge in Portland, Oregon.”

Northwest RiverPartners, which represents a group of river users, hailed the bill as good news for salmon.

Salmon “will continue to benefit from protections that are already working,” director Terry Flores said.

But environmental groups were dismayed by the bill.

“This legislation ensures that we continue on the same costly, ineffective path that has seen continued declines in wild salmon in the Pacific Northwest,” the environmental groups said in a joint press release.

The bill “would push salmon closer to extinction,” they contend.
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It’s a punchline that sends every 12-year-old boy into a fit of giggles. Now it has been proven to be true. Uranus stinks!

Scientists using a huge telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano found the seventh planet from the sun is surrounded by clouds made up of hydrogen sulfide, the gas that smells like rotten eggs and bad flatulence.

The study by scientists from the California Institute of Technology, University of Oxford and the University of Leicester was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

“If an unfortunate human were ever to descend through Uranus’ clouds they would be met with very unpleasant and odiferous conditions,” Patrick Irwin of the University of Oxford wrote.

Not that they would live long enough to sniff it. “Suffocation and exposure in the negative 200 degrees Celsius atmosphere made of mostly hydrogen, helium and methane would take its toll long before the smell,” Irwin wrote.

Despite previous observations by ground telescopes and the Voyager 2 spacecraft, scientists had failed to determine the composition of Uranus’ atmosphere.

The new data was obtained by using a spectrometer on the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii. It should help scientists better understand the formation of Uranus and other outer planets.
…

A customer from Beijing and one from Hong Kong walk into Starbucks. A chair blocks the path between the counter and their seats. Who of the two moves the chair?

It’s not a joke. It’s a psychology experiment, designed to test the long-lasting imprints of a culture’s agrarian past.

A new study in the journal Science Advances says that over thousands of years, rice farmers in southern China have evolved a culture of interdependence not found in northern, wheat-growing parts of the country. 

The authors say those influences persist even in China’s modern, relatively wealthy cities, among people who have never farmed. And they show up in how people behave in their daily lives — even as they navigate their local coffee shop.

Rice theory

The study found people were much less likely to move the Starbucks chair in southern China, where rice has been the staple crop for thousands of years, than those in the wheat-farming north.

According to what the researchers call the “rice theory of culture,” growing rice demands more cooperation than growing most other crops. Neighbors in rice-farming villages have to coordinate when they will flood and drain their paddies, for example.

And since rice requires about twice as much labor as wheat, rice-growing villagers often share the workload.

Over the centuries, people developed “folkways and habits of thoughts and behavior norms that, once they’re established, you’re not even thinking, ‘I’m doing this because I’m a rice farmer.’ If you’re thinking about it at all, you’re thinking about it as, ‘I’m doing this because I’m a good person. Because that’s how I was raised. Because that’s what they talk about in school,’ ” said psychologist Andrew Ryder at Concordia University in Montreal, who was not part of the research team.

Moving the chairs

To test their theory, University of Chicago psychologist Thomas Talhelm and colleagues went to Starbucks in five cities: Beijing and Shenyang in the wheat-growing north; and Guangzhou, Shanghai and Hong Kong in the rice-growing south.

They chose the Western coffee chain for its uniformity, introducing fewer variables in the environment that might complicate the results.

Researchers put two chairs a hip’s width apart in high-traffic aisles and watched how customers got past them.

In southern China, almost everyone squeezed through them. Just 6 percent moved a chair.

In the north, on the other hand, 16 percent were chair-movers.

“Previous research has found that when people in independent cultures like the United States encounter a problem, they’re more likely to want to change the environment to solve that problem,” Talhelm said. “But when people in interdependent cultures like Japan encounter problems, they’re more likely to try to fit [themselves] into the environment.”

Moving the chair rather than squeezing past it suggests a more independent mindset, he said.

The study also found northerners were more likely than southerners to sit alone: There were about 10 percent more singletons in northern Starbucks shops compared with southern ones during the week, and about 5 percent more on weekends.

Modernization

Talhelm said the findings go against the common theory that “as areas become more wealthy, more modernized [and] more urbanized, people become more individualistic or more Western.”

Even in Hong Kong, among the wealthiest, most modern and most urban cities in China, chair-movers were rare and few people sat alone.

“People’s farming legacies seem to be more important than GDP in explaining their behavior,” he added.

The researchers also checked population density, age, gender, climate and disease presence. Nothing explained the results as well as the rice versus wheat split.

The findings fit with a different type of study Talhelm and colleagues did that tested students on measures of thinking style. They found the same cultural differences between rice-growing regions and wheat-growing regions, even among students from rice-growing or wheat-growing regions of the same county.

The rice theory had been “floating around for quite a long time,” Ryder said, but “I think people hadn’t even necessarily expected that it would be all that testable.” 

Now, he noted, several studies from different approaches are converging on the same results. 

And, he added, it’s an important reminder that China is not a cultural monolith. No country is.

“Get away from ‘one country equals one culture,’ ” he said.

Next, Talhelm is testing the theory in India, another country with a rice/wheat split. 
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The World Health Organization is joining a worldwide call to stop a resurgence of malaria that threatens much of the progress made over the past decade. To mark World Malaria Day, WHO is pushing for urgent action – and money – to get the global fight against this ancient scourge back on track.

For many years, World Malaria Day has been a cause for celebration, but not this year.  World Health Organization data show that starting in 2016  progress has been at a standstill and hopes of ending the global epidemic by 2030 are slipping away.

Watch: Fears Grow Over Malaria Resurgence, London Summit Urges Global Action

Director of WHO’s Global Malaria Program, Pedro Alonso, says some of the gains made in reducing the number of cases and deaths in countries across all regions of the world are being reversed.

“As a consequence, we now have about 260 million cases of malaria every year, in excess of 440,000 deaths every year…13:52…History has told us very clearly that when we stop making progress, it is not that we just stand still, but we go backwards and then malaria comes back, and comes back with a vengeance,” Alonso said. 

About 90 percent of all malaria cases and deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa.  Children under the age of five, pregnant women and patients with HIV-AIDS are most at risk.

Alonso says global political commitment must be renewed and donors and affected countries must increase the financial resources needed to successfully tackle malaria. 

“And, we need new and improved tools to prevent, diagnose and treat malaria,” Alonso said. “Our sense is that with the resources available today and with the tools we have today, we have seen the limit of what can be achieved.”  

The issue of malaria’s resurgence came up on the sidelines of a Commonwealth summit in London this month, where Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates  who has invested billions of dollars in fighting malaria  pledged yet another one billion dollars to the effort.

WHO estimates $5.5 billion are needed each year to wage a successful global fight against malaria.  However, only about half that amount has been pledged.

Vector control is the main way to prevent and reduce the spread of malaria.  Alonso says better insecticides, better insecticide-treated mosquito nets as well as better drugs are essential in combating the disease.

 
…

The theme of this year’s World Malaria Day, Wednesday April 25th, is Ready to Beat Malaria. Along with medical advances, beating the disease will take money. After sixteen years of steady decline, malaria cases are on the rise again globally, and experts warn that unless efforts to tackle the disease are stepped up, the gains could be lost. Henry Ridgwell reports from a malaria summit earlier this month in London, where delegates called for a boost in funding for global anti-malarial programs.
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The Environmental Protection Agency announced a new rule Tuesday that would stop it from relying on scientific research underpinned by confidential data in its making of regulations.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt billed the measure as a way to boost transparency for the benefit of the industries his agency regulates. But scientists and former EPA officials worry it will hamstring the agency’s ability to protect public health by putting key medical and industry data off limits.

“The science that we use is going to be transparent, it’s going to be reproducible,” Pruitt told a gathering at the EPA.

“It’s going to be able to be analyzed by those in the marketplace, and those that watch what we do can make informed decisions about whether we’ve drawn the proper conclusions or not,” said Pruitt, who has been pursuing President Donald Trump’s mission to ease the regulatory burden on business.

The EPA has for decades relied on scientific research that is rooted in confidential medical and industry data as a basis for its air, water and chemicals rules. While it publishes enormous amounts of research and data to the public, the confidential material is held back.

Business interests have argued the practice is tantamount to writing laws behind closed doors and unfairly prevents them from vetting the research underpinning the EPA’s often costly regulatory requirements. They argue that if the data cannot be published, the rules should not be adopted.

But ex-EPA officials say the practice is vital.

“Other government agencies also use studies like these to develop policy and regulations, and to buttress and defend rules against legal challenges. They are, in fact, essential to making sound public policy,” former EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy and Janet McCabe, former assistant administrator for air and water, wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times last month.

The new policy would be based on proposed legislation spearheaded by the chairman of the House Science Committee, Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican who denies mainstream climate change science.

Emails obtained through a public records request last week showed that Smith or his staff met with Pruitt’s staff in recent months to craft the policy. Those emails also showed that Pruitt’s staff grappled with the possibility the policy would complicate things for the chemicals industry, which submits reams of confidential data to EPA regulatory programs.
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Iceland’s small, snowy capital, Reykjavik, has been crowned the greenest

city for travelers, with the most green space per head of 50 cities surveyed, a travel agency said Tuesday.

Auckland in New Zealand came in second, followed by the Slovakian capital Bratislava and Sweden’s Gothenburg, with Sydney in Australia taking fifth place in the Green Cities Index published by TravelBird, a Dutch online holiday provider.

“Many popular city destinations around the world have made significant strides towards both preserving and manufacturing green spaces,” Fiona Vanderbroeck, chief traveler officer at TravelBird, said in a statement. “We aim to inspire travelers to see city trips differently — inviting them to connect with nature whilst also enjoying the vibrancy, culture and liveliness they look for in a city.”

The United Nations estimates that by 2050 more than two-thirds of the world will live in urban areas and has called for a radical rethink of urban planning.

Green spaces cool down cities, encourage physical activity and can provide stress relief, increase social interaction and improve mental well-being, the World Health Organization says.

The index analyzed mapping data from 50 popular city break destinations, evaluating the types and number of green spaces such as parks, golf courses, meadows, vineyards and farms. It found that coastal Reykjavik, home to about 120,000 people, has 410 square meters (4,413 square feet) of

greenery per inhabitant, boosted by its large national parks.

At the other end

Tokyo was the least green city, followed by Turkey’s Istanbul, Athens in Greece, Lyon in France and Chile’s Santiago, all with less than 8 square meters of greenery per resident.

Edinburgh ranked the greenest city in Britain, and Washington D.C., and Los Angeles came tops in the United States.

Cities are taking steps to improve their green credentials — banning diesel vehicles, using zero-emission buses and setting tougher air pollution limits — to achieve the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
…

Malaria is spreading rapidly in crisis-hit Venezuela, with more than an estimated 406,000 cases in 2017, up roughly 69 percent from a year before, the largest increase worldwide, the World Health Organization (WHO) said

Tuesday.

Venezuelan migrants fleeing the economic and social crisis are carrying the mosquito-borne disease into Brazil and other parts of Latin America, the U.N. agency said, urging authorities to provide free screening and treatment regardless of their legal status to avoid further spread.

“In the Americas, it’s not just Venezuela. We’re actually reporting increases in a number of other countries. Venezuela, yes this is a significant concern, malaria is increasing and it’s increasing in a very worrying way,” Pedro Alonso, director of WHO’s global malaria program, told a news briefing.

Venezuela is slipping into hyperinflation with shortages of food and medicines during a fifth year of recession that President Nicolas Maduro’s government blames on Western hostility and falling oil prices.

Venezuelan officials reported 240,613 malaria cases in 2016, many in the gold-mining state of Bolivar bordering Guyana, with an estimated 280 deaths, according to the WHO.

‘Massive increase’

The 2017 estimate has leaped to 406,000 cases — five times higher than in 2013.

“What we are now seeing is a massive increase, probably reaching close to half a million cases per year. These are the largest increases reported anywhere in the world,” Alonso said.

A lack of resources and ineffective anti-malaria campaigns were to blame, he said. WHO and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) are working with Venezuelan authorities to address the situation, he added.

“We are seeing, indeed because of population movement, cases among Venezuelan migrants appearing in other countries — Brazil certainly, but also in Colombia, in Ecuador and in a number of other places,” Alonso said.

“What this calls for is renewed effort by the countries surrounding Venezuela to ensure adequate diagnosis and treatment free for whoever shows up at medical services,” he said.

The global campaign against the life-threatening disease has stalled for the first time in a decade, with a reversal of gains made in some countries, the WHO said last November.

Malaria infected around 216 million people in 91 countries in 2016, killing 445,000, with 90 percent of cases and fatalities in sub-Saharan Africa, it said.
…

The path to sharper vision has gone from glasses to contact lenses to laser correction… and now, to eye drops. Faith Lapidus has details of the latest development.
…

A woman who played a key role in exposing the lead-tainted water disaster in Flint, Michigan, is among seven people from around the world to be awarded a Goldman Environmental Prize for grassroots environmental activism.

 

LeeAnne Walters was repeatedly rebuffed by Gov. Rick Snyder’s administration, even as she confronted regulators with bottles of brown water that came from her kitchen tap. Finally, with critical help from a Virginia Tech research team and a local doctor, it was revealed in 2015 that Flint’s water system was contaminated with lead due to a lack of treatment.

Walters, a mother of four, “worked tirelessly behind the scenes to bring justice to not only her immediate family but all residents of Flint,” the Goldman Environmental Foundation said Monday in announcing this year’s winners.

 

The prize was created in 1989 by the late San Francisco philanthropists Richard and Rhoda Goldman. Winners are selected from nominations made by environmental organizations and others. The prize carries a $200,000 award.

 

In Flint, thousands of home water lines are being replaced due to the lead crisis. The city’s water quality has improved since it stopped using the Flint River as its source after 18 months, although there are many concerns about lead that was ingested, especially by children.

 

The other winners are:

Francia Marquez of Colombia, who rallied other women to vigorously oppose gold mining in the Cauca region.
Claire Nouvian of France, who successfully campaigned against deep-sea fish trawling.
Makoma Lekalakala and Liz McDaid of South Africa, who fought to stop a nuclear plant deal between their country and Russia.
Manny Calonzo of the Philippines, who led an effort to ban lead paint.
Khanh Nguy Thi of Vietnam, who used scientific research to discourage dependency on coal-fired power.

…

NASA’s new boss is already getting cheers from space.

 

Immediately after being sworn into office Monday by Vice President Mike Pence, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine took a call from the three U.S. astronauts at the International Space Station who offered “hearty congratulations.” The Oklahoma congressman became the 13th administrator of NASA, filling a position that had been vacant for more than a year.

 

“America loves what you guys are doing,” Bridenstine, a former naval aviator, told the astronauts. He promised to do his best “as we reach for new heights and reveal the unknown for the benefit of humankind.”

 

This is the 60th anniversary year for NASA .

 

Bridenstine is the first elected official to lead NASA, something that had bogged down his nomination last year by President Donald Trump. The Senate approved his nomination last week by a narrow vote of 50-49. Monday’s swearing-in ceremony took place at NASA headquarters in Washington.

 

Pence noted that the space agency, under Bridenstine’s direction, will work to get astronauts back to the moon and then, with help from commercial space and international partners, on to Mars.

 

“NASA will lead the way,” said Pence, who heads the newly resurrected National Space Council.

 

Charles Bolden Jr., a former space shuttle commander and major general in the Marines, was NASA’s last official administrator. The space agency was led by Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot in the interim. Lightfoot retires from NASA at the end of this month.
…

A young military veteran who had his genitals blown off in a blast in Afghanistan has received the world’s most extensive penis transplant.

Surgeons at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, rebuilt the man’s entire pelvic region —  transplanting a penis, scrotum and part of the abdominal wall from a deceased donor — in a highly experimental 14-hour operation.

Doctors said Monday he is recovering well and is expected to leave the hospital this week.

The patient, who asked to remain anonymous, is expected to recover urinary and eventually, sexual function.

The scrotum transplant did not include the donor’s testicles, meaning reproduction won’t be possible.

“We just felt there were too many unanswered ethical questions” with that extra step, said Hopkins’ Dr. Damon Cooney.

Three other successful penis transplants have been reported, two in South Africa and one in 2016 at Massachusetts General Hospital. Those transplants involved only the penis and not extensive surrounding tissue that made this transplant much more complex.

The Hopkins patient received an extra experimental step — an infusion of bone marrow from his donor that research suggests may help a recipient’s immune system better tolerate a transplant. Surgeons said this treatment enables the veteran to take one anti-rejection drug instead of several.

 

A statement from Hopkins included a quote from the patient, saying, “When I first woke up, I felt finally more normal.”
…

California will suffer more volatile weather this century with a “whiplash” from drought to rain and mounting risks a repeat of the devastating “Great Flood” of 1862, scientists said on Monday.

Climate change, driven by man-made greenhouse gas emissions, would drive more extreme shifts between hot and dry summers and wet winters in the most populous U.S. state, they wrote in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Global warming is making California and other regions with similar Mediterranean-style climates, from southern Europe to parts of Australia, drier and warmer in summer, said lead author Daniel Swain of the University of California, Los Angeles.

In California in winter “an opposing trend toward a strong Pacific jet stream is projected to locally enhance precipitation during the core months of the ‘rainy season,'” he told Reuters.

“Natural precipitation variability in this region is already large, and projected future whiplash increases would amplify existing swings between dry and wet years,” the authors wrote.

They projected “a 25 percent to 100 percent increase in extreme dry-to-wet precipitation events” this century.

California had its worst drought in recorded history from 2010—2016, followed by severe rains and flooding that culminated with evacuation orders for almost 200,000 residents as a precaution near the Oroville Dam last year.

The study said major urban centers, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, were “more likely than not” to suffer a freak series of storms by 2060 similar to ones in 1861-62 that led to the “Great Flood.”

The storms swamped the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys, flooding an area 300 miles (500 km) long and 20 miles wide.

Storms washed away bridges, inundated mines and wrecked farms.

A repeat “would probably lead to considerable loss of life and economic damages approaching a trillion dollars,” the study said.

As part of planning, Swain said the state should expand use of floodplains that can be deliberately flooded to soak up rains, such as the Yolo Bypass which protects the city of Sacramento.

The study assumes, however, that global greenhouse gas emissions will keep rising, at odds with the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement under which almost 200 nations agreed to cut emissions to net zero between 2050 and 2100.

“Such a future can be partially, but not completely, avoided” if the world takes tougher action, Swain said. He noted that existing government pledges to limit warming fall well short of the Paris goals.

U.S. President Donald Trump, who doubts mainstream findings that greenhouse gas emissions are the main cause of warming, plans to quit the deal, saying he wants to promote the U.S. fossil fuel industry.
…

A British scientist is proposing a new approach to fighting the spread of malaria, a treatable mosquito-borne disease that kills hundreds of thousands each year, the vast majority of them young children in Africa. As Faith Lapidus reports, he is developing an antimalarial drug designed not for humans, but for mosquitoes.
…

Each year on April 22, many people stop to think about the health of the world environment, as as if it were a New Year’s Day for nature, many make resolutions to treat the world around them more responsibly.

The day first celebrated in 1970 is approaching a half-century of existence with a movement that started in the United States and spread around the world. People celebrate the day with environmental action such as natural area cleanups, public demonstrations, tree plantings and, in 2016, the signing of the international Paris climate agreement, which aims to keep climate change in check.

The theme for 2018 is plastic pollution. Experts say a large mass of discarded plastic that has gathered in the Pacific Ocean, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, has grown to more than 600,000 square miles — more than 155 million hectares (600,000 square miles), or twice the size of the U.S. state of Texas.

The patch developed in less than 100 years, as plastics have been in common use only since the 1950s. It is one of several masses of refuse found in the world’s oceans, brought together by weather patterns and water currents. Experts say many types of plastic that do not biodegrade can remain in the environment for up to 2,000 years.

This year’s Earth Day focuses on getting rid of single-use plastics, promoting the using of alternative materials, recycling and developing more responsible behaviors concerning the use of plastics.

The environmental group behind Earth Day, the Earth Day Network, estimates that 1 billion people around the world recognize Earth Day in some way.
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The food industry uses plastic to wrap its products in many places around the world. Plastic manufacturers say that keeps produce and meat fresh longer, so less goes bad and is thrown away. But, according to a new European study, while the annual use of plastic packaging has grown since the 1950s, so has food waste. Faiza Elmasry has the story. Faith Lapidus narrates.
…

Tuesday marks the start of World Immunization Week, set aside by the U.N. to remind parents with children, and even adults, to get immunized against deadly diseases. The World Health Organization, which is hosting the event is encouraging governments to invest in immunization efforts, urging advocates to make vaccines a priority, and asking people to get themselves and their families vaccinated. VOA’s Carol Pearson reports.
…

The Pan American Health Organization aims to get 70 million people in the Americas and the Caribbean vaccinated this week as part of the U.N.-designated World Immunization Week. 

Dr. Flavia Bustreo worked for years at the World Health Organization and for GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance. She says, “Immunization and vaccines are the most powerful public health tools that we have.”

 

WATCH: WHO Urges Everyone: Make Vaccines a Priority

Imagine, she says, how many lives could have been saved if a vaccine for AIDS were available in the 1980s, when doctors discovered the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS. 

Between April 24 and April 30, the U.N. wants everyone to be aware that vaccines save millions of lives each year, from the very young to the very old. It’s encouraging governments to invest in immunization efforts, telling advocates to make vaccines a priority, and urging people to get themselves and their families vaccinated. 

Only in humans

According to the WHO, close to 13 million children have lost their lives to diseases in the last 35 years — lives that might have been saved if these children had been vaccinated. 

Measles is a disease that exists only in humans, not in the wild. It’s highly contagious and can cause blindness, deafness and intellectual disabilities, yet many parents are concerned that the vaccine could harm their children, even though study after study shows the vaccine is safe.

Other parents don’t vaccinate their children because they have never experienced how sick measles can make their children. In 2017, measles killed 35 people, mostly children in Europe. In Italy, there were 3,232 cases of measles from January through June, while in 2016, there were only 478 in the same time period.

While global measles deaths have decreased 84 percent worldwide in recent years — from 550,100 deaths in 2000 to 89,780 in 2016 — the WHO reports that measles is still common in some developing countries, particularly in parts of Africa and Asia.

Comeback for measles?

Measles has now been eradicated from the Americas, but with the number of parents who don’t immunize their children, there is growing concern that the highly contagious disease could make a comeback. 

The WHO reports that immunization rates in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina are as low as 40 percent in some areas and continuing to decline, increasing the risk of larger outbreaks.

Bustreo says when children are not vaccinated, it affects their health and the health of others. 

“We need to have vaccination coverage that is about 90 percent in order to have what we call the “herd effect” … which means you cover the children who are vaccinated, but also, because of the reduction of transmission of infections, you also cover the children that are not vaccinated,” she says.

Vaccines exist for many other deadly diseases as well. The WHO aims to vaccinate as many as 1 billion people from 27 high-risk African countries by the year 2026 against yellow fever — a mosquito-borne disease that can be fatal.

Misinformation in Brazil

On the VOA program Africa 54, Dr. Ken Redcross told viewers, “It’s fatal because it can cause liver failure. It can cause kidney failure. It can even cause what’s called a coagulopathy, which is a long word to mean that it causes a problem with our blood clotting.” 

In Brazil, efforts to vaccinate up to 24 million people against the disease have fallen short because some fear the vaccine is unsafe. Officials have been trying to counter this misinformation.  Red Cross says not only is the vaccine safe, it’s also highly effective. “It confers 90 percent immunity. And that’s huge as a vaccine goes,” Redcross says.

Brazilian public health authorities announced in early 2017 an outbreak of yellow fever in several eastern states of Brazil, including areas where yellow fever was not traditionally considered to be a risk. Since the end of 2017, yellow fever cases have reoccurred in several states, including areas close to the city of Sao Paulo.

Yellow fever in U.S.

On its website, the Florida Department of Health says yellow fever was a major public health concern in the U.S. and was responsible for several large outbreaks in Florida during the 1700s and 1800s. 

The mosquito that transmits yellow fever is in the southern U.S. With international travel, there’s concern that yellow fever could again become a major public health concern in the U.S. 

The WHO is urging countries to strengthen routine immunizations. Among its goals by the year 2020: to complete international efforts to end polio, which now exists in only three countries, thanks to a highly effective vaccine. The WHO also wants to control more vaccine-preventable diseases and develop new vaccines for HIV and other diseases that still plague the modern world.
…

The United Kingdom is proposing a ban on disposable plastic straws.

With Earth Day coming up this Sunday, advocates are asking everyone to follow suit and skip the straw.

Straws and stirrers are among the top 10 items found in coastal cleanups worldwide, according to the nonprofit Ocean Conservancy, which has been conducting annual trash pickups for more than 30 years.

The group says the ocean is littered with 150 million metric tons of plastic trash, clogging coastlines, ensnaring wildlife and even littering land far from any human settlement.

And each year, another 8 million tons wash in, according to a recent study.

At the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in London on Thursday, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May announced plans to ban plastic straws, stirrers and cotton ear buds.

May called on other Commonwealth nations to do the same.

Skipping the straw will not solve the problem on its own, acknowledges Nick Mallos, director of the Ocean Conservancy’s Trash Free Seas Program. 

“But they are a tangible action that all of us as individuals can take that do add up,” he said.

“It’s also about this mind shift that takes place when you start thinking about, ‘Oh, I don’t need a straw.’” Mallos added. “It cascades into other aspects of your consumer decision-making. Maybe after (skipping) the straw becomes habit, you think about the next step you might be able to take to reduce your waste footprint.”
…

NASA’s latest nail-biting drama was far from orbit as the Senate narrowly confirmed President Donald Trump’s choice of a tea party congressman to run the space agency in an unprecedented party-line vote.

In a 50-49 vote Thursday, Oklahoma Representative James Bridenstine, a Navy Reserve pilot, was confirmed as NASA’s 13th administrator, an agency that usually is kept away from partisanship. His three predecessors — two nominated by Republicans — were all approved unanimously. Before that, one NASA chief served under three presidents, two Republicans and a Democrat.

The two days of voting were as tense as a launch countdown.

A procedural vote Wednesday initially ended in a 49-49 tie — Vice President Mike Pence, who normally breaks a tie, was at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida — before Arizona Republican Jeff Flake switched from opposition to support, using his vote as leverage to address an unrelated issue.

Thursday’s vote included the drama of another delayed but approving vote by Flake, a last-minute no vote by Illinois Democrat Tammy Duckworth — who wheeled onto the floor with her 10-day-old baby in tow — and the possibility of a tie-breaker by Pence, who was back in town.

NASA is a couple years away from launching a new giant rocket and crew capsule to replace the space shuttle fleet that was retired in 2011.

“I look forward to working with the outstanding team at NASA to achieve the president’s vision for American leadership in space,” Bridenstine said in a NASA release after the vote. 

Sharply different views

Democrats opposing Bridenstine said his outspoken divisiveness, earlier rejection of mainstream climate change science and lack of space experience made him unqualified. Republicans praised him as a qualified war hero.

“His record of behavior in the Congress is as divisive as any in Washington, including his attacks on members of this body from his own party,” Florida Democrat Bill Nelson said.

Senator Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, cited past Bridenstine comments that rejected mainstream climate science, invoking the movie “Apollo 13.”

“Houston, we have a problem,” Markey said. “NASA’s science, NASA’s mission and American leadership will be in jeopardy under Congressman Bridenstine’s leadership.”

During his confirmation hearing, Bridenstine said he acknowledged that global warming was real and man-made, but wouldn’t say that it was mostly human-caused, as the overwhelming majority of scientists and scientific literature have done. And Bridenstine told Nelson, “I want to make sure that NASA remains, as you said, apolitical.”

Texas Republican Ted Cruz praised the NASA nominee as “a war hero.”

“NASA needs a strong leader and it will have that strong leader in Jim Bridenstine,” Cruz said.

Sean O’Keefe, who was NASA chief under President George W. Bush and was confirmed unanimously, said the close vote “is a consequence of an erosion of comity in the Congress, particularly in the Senate. Political fights will always break out, but now most policy choices are more likely to emerge based on the party with the majority than the power of the idea.”

Alan Ladwig, a top NASA political appointee under Democrats, said this was a case of both party politics and a divisive nominee who doesn’t accept science.
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The World Health Organization says the first-ever vaccine for dengue needs to be dealt with in “a much safer way,” meaning that the shot should mostly be given to people who have previously been infected with the disease.

In November, the vaccine’s manufacturer, Sanofi Pasteur, said people who had never been sickened by dengue before were at risk of developing a more serious disease after getting the shot.

After a two-day meeting this week, WHO’s independent vaccines group said it now had proof the vaccine should only be used “exclusively or almost exclusively in people who have already been infected with dengue.”

The U.N. health agency said a test should be developed so doctors would be able to quickly tell if people had previously been sickened by dengue – but the group acknowledged doing that so isn’t straightforward.

“We see significant obstacles in using the vaccine this way, but we are confident this also spurs the development of a rapid diagnostic test,” said Dr. Joachim Hombach, executive secretary of WHO’s expert group, during a news conference Thursday.

Sanofi said last year that doctors should consider whether people might have been previously infected with dengue before deciding whether they should risk getting immunized. The company said it expected to take a 100 million euro ($118 million) loss based on that news.

People who catch dengue more than once can be at risk of a hemorrhagic version of the disease. The mosquito-spread virus is found in tropical and sub-tropical climates across Latin and South America, Asia, Africa and elsewhere. It causes a flu-like disease that can cause joint pain, nausea, vomiting and a rash. In severe cases, dengue can result in breathing problems, hemorrhaging and organ failure.

About half the world’s population is at risk of dengue; WHO estimates that about 96 million people are sickened by the viral infection every year.

Following Sanofi’s announcement last year, the Philippines halted its dengue immunization program, the world’s first national vaccination program for dengue. The government also demanded a refund of more than 3 billion pesos ($59 million) from Sanofi and is considering further legal action.

In February, the Philippines said the vaccine was potentially linked to the deaths of three people: all of them died of dengue despite having received the vaccine.

The country imposed a symbolic fine of $2,000 on Sanofi and suspended the vaccine’s approval, charging that the drugmaker broke rules on how the shot was registered and marketed.

More than 730,000 children aged 9 and above in the Philippines have received at least one dose of the dengue vaccine, usually delivered in three doses.

There is no specific treatment for dengue and there are no other licensed vaccines on the market.
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The most decorated Olympian of all time, swimmer Michael Phelps no longer competes, but he’s never far from water. As Earth Day celebrations get underway, Phelps talks to VOA News about water conservation and what he does at home to preserve the precious resource. Tina Trinh reports.
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Friday is April 20, or 4/20. That’s the numerical code for marijuana’s high holiday, a celebration and homage to pot’s enduring and universal slang for smoking.

 

Festivities are planned worldwide, culminating with a synchronized smoke at 4:20 p.m. local time.

 

How the marijuana-loving world came to mark the occasion is believed traceable to five Northern California men now in their 60s with bad backs and graying hair. They are the unofficial grandmasters by virtue of the code they created nearly 50 years ago as students at a suburban San Francisco high school in 1971.

 

“We thought it was a joke then,” said David Reddix, a filmmaker and retired CNN cameraman. “We still do.”

 

Reddix and his four buddies – Steve Capper, Larry Schwartz, Jeff Noel and Mark Gravich – were a stoner clique who hung out at a particular wall between classes at San Rafael High School. They dubbed themselves “The Waldos,” a term coined by comedian Buddy Hackett to describe odd people.

 

One fall afternoon in 1971 a non-Waldo classmate came to the wall with an intriguing tale and a crudely drawn map.

 

The map purported to show the location of a marijuana garden in the forest of nearby Point Reyes National Seashore. The classmate said the pot patch belonged to his brother-in-law, a Coast Guard reservist stationed at Point Reyes.

 

The classmate explained his brother-in-law, paranoid of exposure and washing out of the reserves, was renouncing ownership of the garden. He handed Capper the map and said The Waldos were welcome to the marijuana.

 

The five excited friends made plans to find the weed after school and decided to meet in front of the school’s statue of Louis Pasteur at 4:20 p.m., when two of them finished football practice.

 

They piled into Capper’s 1966 Chevy Impala, popped in a Grateful Dead 8-track tape and passed around joints as they drove the 45 minutes to the coast.

 

The five, now firmly middle-class fathers dressed in Polo shirts and khaki pants, laugh about tumbling out of a marijuana smoke-filled car when they arrived at their destination.

 

“It was straight of a Cheech and Chong movie,” Schwartz said.

 

They didn’t find the patch that day, but vowed to keep searching. They would pass in the halls and whisper “420 Louis” to each other if a new attempt was planned, indicating they should meet at 4:20 p.m. at the Pasteur statue.

 

The patch was never found.

 

“We were probably too stoned,” Schwartz said.

 

But the “420 Louis” stuck as code for “let’s get high at the statue after school.” Soon after, it was shortened to simply 420 and meant “let’s get high anywhere.”

 

There were myriad reasons for the teens to speak in code about smoking marijuana in 1971. Marijuana’s growing social tolerance was still decades away and people were receiving stiff prison sentences after being caught with even small amounts.

 

Another big reason: Noel’s father was a narcotics agent for the California Department of Justice.

 

“He had an inkling we smoked,” Noel said. “But I don’t think he ever caught on to 420.”

 

The five Waldos never moved far away and all remain close. Gravich’s youngest daughter attends his alma mater and his oldest daughter is a recent graduate. Both say they’ve long been aware of their father’s involvement in creating 420.

 

“The kids here think it’s pretty cool,” said Sophia Gravich, a sophomore.

 

The code remained confined to The Waldos’ social circle until they began hanging out backstage at Grateful Dead concerts. Reddix’s older brother was friends with band member Phil Lesh and that led to backstage passes and smoking sessions with the roadies and other crew members, who picked up the code.

 

The number really took off in the late 1980s when flyers were circulated at Dead concerts proclaiming 420 to be the password of stoner culture. The flyers went on to explain that 420 was California police code for marijuana smoking in progress. It’s not, but that and other origin stories continue to circulate to the point that Capper and Reddix have committed themselves to preserving as much proof as they can that they are the originators.

 

They tracked down the Coast Guard reservist to record his recollections confirming he grew a marijuana garden and drew the map that launched the treasure hunt. With his permission, they obtained his Coast Guard records, which show him stationed at Point Reyes at the appropriate time.

 

They keep those records in a rented safe deposit box in a San Francisco bank where they also store other documentation, including postmarked letters they exchanged in the mid-1970s discussing 420. The San Francisco bank’s address, as it happens, is 420 Montgomery Street.

 

The Oxford English Dictionary added 420 to its lexicon last year after reviewing the Waldo’s records and credits the men as the creators.

 

Millions of dollars have been made over the years exploiting the number, from T-shirts and hats to cannabis businesses with 420 in their names. Hotels and tour companies advertise themselves as “420 friendly” and dating sites contain listings for people “420 compatible.”

 

Though dozens of 420-related trademarks have been issued to various companies, The Waldos hold none.

 

But they are starting to cash in, if only a little.

 

Lagunitas Brewing Co. in nearby Petaluma is set to release its seasonal “The Wados Special Ale” on April 20. The brewery has given the five lifetime passes for free beer.

 

The Waldos also struck their first business deal with a cannabis business. They are endorsing a Oakland company’s vaping pen, which of course will be released on Friday at 4:20 p.m. All five plan to be at the company’s release party .

 

“Everyone has cashed in on 420,” Noel said. “Why not us?”

 
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After 16 years of steady decline, malaria cases are on the rise again globally, and experts warn that unless efforts to tackle the disease are stepped up, the gains could be lost. Henry Ridgwell reports from a malaria summit Wednesday in London, where delegates called for a boost in funding for global anti-malarial programs.
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