Science

Australia Steps up Effort to Save Vulnerable Koalas

A koala hospital and new wildlife reserves are the focus of one of Australia’s boldest plans to protect the vulnerable marsupial. Almost 25,000 hectares of state forest will be set aside for koalas in New South Wales state, which will also set up a new clinic north of Sydney to provide specialist care for sick and injured animals.

Koalas are officially listed as vulnerable to extinction in New South Wales. The state government is to spend $34 million on a range of measures to protect the iconic marsupial.Special reserves will be set up where the animals will be able to breed freely.

The koala population in New South Wales has fallen by a quarter over the past two decades. It is estimated there are 36,000 koalas left in the state.Their numbers have also fallen in other parts of Australia.

The animals face various threats, including a loss of habitat due to land-clearing, attacks by dogs, bushfires, heatwaves and road accidents. A sexually-transmitted disease — chlamydia — is also harming the health of many koalas.

Special measures will also be put in place to help drivers avoid koalas that stray onto highways, including better signs. Tunnels and specially-made bridges have also allowed wildlife to traverse roads while avoiding cars and trucks.

New South Wales environment minister Gabrielle Upton hopes to set up a network of koala and wildlife hospitals to help injured animals.

“This is so there are places that we can have resident expertise in one placein places where we know that koala populations are present and need to be sustained and therefore increased over time. We are going to trial chlamydia vaccinations. Chlamydia is a disease that impacts them most severely on the north coast in New South Wales. There are some really practical parts of this package that address some of the roadkill hot-spots,” said Upton.

“We have had some success with underpasses and overpasses in areas where they know they have core habitat. We need to ensure we have the right road signs, the right fencing.”

The new koala clinic will be set up in Port Stephens, north of Sydney. It will join an existing hospital in the regional town of Port Macquarie that began treating injured marsupials in 1973.

Conservationists have welcomed the new facility but argue that the New South Wales state government’s multi-million dollar plan does not address the number one threat to koalas – land clearing and logging.

The koala lives in trees and has large furry ears, sharp claws adapted for climbing and no tail. It features in many Aboriginal stories of creation and is considered a totemic species.

NASA to Send Tiny Helicopter to Mars 

NASA is planning to send a tiny autonomous helicopter to Mars on its next rover mission to the red planet.

The space agency announced Friday that the helicopter will be carried aboard the Mars 2020 rover as a technology demonstration to test its ability to serve as a scout and to reach locations not accessible by ground.

The helicopter is being developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

The craft weighs less than 4 pounds (1.8 kilograms), has a fuselage about the size of a softball and twin, counter-rotating blades that will spin at almost 3,000 rpm — a necessity in the thin Martian atmosphere. Solar cells will charge its lithium-ion batteries.

Flights will be programmed because the distance to Mars precludes real-time commands from Earth.

Creating Milk Alternatives for Animal Babies

Aardvarks are not the most attractive animals. They have rabbitlike ears, a kangaroo tail and a nose like a pig. But they are mammals, and that means they feed their babies milk. At the Cincinnati Zoo in Ohio, an aardvark mother is contributing to the largest collection of exotic animal milk in the world. As Faiza Elmasry tells us, the milk is used to learn about mammal nutrition and help create milk alternatives for animal babies that need to be hand-raised. VOA’s Faith Lapidus narrates.

How Close Is Electric Aviation?

Electric-powered ground transport is slowly but steadily taking over from one based on fossil fuels. Electric cars, buses, bikes, scooters, even electric skateboards are growing more common on streets around the world. The next step is electric aviation, and airplane manufacturers are eyeing this potentially very lucrative market. VOA’s George Putic reports.

Trump Administration Prescribes Remedy for Headache of High Drug Prices

America will not be “cheated” by foreign countries that “extort” unreasonably low drug prices from U.S. companies, declared President Donald Trump on Friday.

Rolling out an ambitious blueprint to significantly cut the cost of prescription medication here and abroad, Trump announced he is directing U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to make it a priority to prevent foreign countries from forcing American drugmakers to provide medicines at drastically lower prices than in the United States.

“It’s time to end the global freeloading once and for all,” Trump said during a White House Rose Garden event.

Trump did not specifically name any countries, but according to a report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers profit margins on brand-name drugs in the United States are four times as high as in more regulated markets, such as major European countries and Japan.

Earning more profit in such countries presumably would give drugmakers greater maneuverability with their bottom line to charge less in America.   

In its annual report last month on the protection of intellectual property around the world, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, in addition to EU nations and Japan, also specifically criticized the drug pricing and reimbursement policies of Canada, India, South Korea and New Zealand. 

In his Rose Garden comments, Trump also singled out what he called greedy companies and middlemen, who he declared had grown rich through “dishonest double-dealing,” vowing his administration is now “putting American patients first.”

Trump’s plan has four main themes: increasing marketplace competition; empowering private health care plans to negotiate discounts for Medicare beneficiaries; providing new incentives for manufacturers to reduce the list prices of medications; and reducing out-of-pocket costs for patients. 

The president’s plan, however, breaks with one of his campaign promises, which was to authorize the purchasing clout of the federal government to negotiate directly with drug manufacturers for lower prices. 

“Instead of putting forth a bold initiative, the president pulled his punch,” said Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the opposition Democrats in the House of Representatives. “The president is breaking his promise to the American people to allow Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices, which would save seniors billions of dollars at the pharmacy.” 

Medicare is a federal health insurance program, covering 15 percent of the U.S. population, primarily those age 65 and older and certain younger people with disabilities. 

Pelosi is calling on Trump to work “with Democrats to offer real solutions for struggling families, not waste their time bragging about meager, window dressing (a superficial appearance) policies.”

Shortly after the Rose Garden event, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told reporters in the briefing room that much of Trump’s plan can be achieved without legislative action. 

“Most of this can be done by executive action,” Azar said, adding that “some of this will require regulatory action” that would take months, while restructuring the entire U.S. drug system would take years.  

Azar, a former chief executive of the giant Eli Lilly pharmaceutical company, where he raised drug prices, explained incentives need to be put into place to encourage the lowering of prices. 

“The entire system is actually built for increased prices and high prices,” he explained.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), which is the industry’s main lobbying organization, said some of Trump’s proposals could help make medicines more affordable for patients, but “others would disrupt coverage and limit patients’ access to innovative treatments.”

PhRMA President and Chief Executive Officer Stephen Ubl said in a statement the association “will be reviewing the request for information and look forward to participating in the comment process in the coming months.”

SpaceX Launches New Rocket Primed for Future Crewed Missions

An updated version of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, tailored for eventual crewed missions into orbit, made its debut launch Friday from Florida’s Cape Canaveral, carrying a communications satellite for Bangladesh.

The newly minted Block-5 edition of the Falcon 9 — equipped with about 100 upgrades for greater power, safety and reusability than its Block-4 predecessor — lifted off at 4:14 p.m. EDT (2014 GMT) from the Kennedy Space Center.

Minutes later, the Block-5’s main-stage booster flew itself back to Earth to achieve a safe return landing on an unmanned platform vessel floating in the Pacific Ocean.

The recoverable booster for the Block-5 is designed to be reused at least 10 times with minimal refurbishment between flights, allowing more frequent launches at lower cost — a key to the SpaceX business model.

Enhanced rocket reusability also is a core tenet of SpaceX owner and billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk’s broader objectives: making space travel commonplace and ultimately sending humans to Mars.

The flight came a day after the original launch countdown was halted one minute before blastoff time due to a technical problem detected by the rocket’s onboard computers. Friday’s second attempt by SpaceX, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies, appeared to have gone off without a hitch.

China’s Multistory Hog Hotels Elevate Industrial Farms to New Levels

On Yaji Mountain in southern China, they are checking in the sows a thousand head per floor in high-rise “hog hotels.”

Privately owned agricultural company Guangxi Yangxiang Co Ltd is running two seven-floor sow breeding operations, and is putting up four more, including one with as many as 13 floors that will be the world’s tallest building of its kind.

Hog farms of two or three floors have been tried in Europe.

Some are still operating, others have been abandoned, but few new ones have been built in recent years, because of management difficulties and public resistance to large, intensive farms.

Now, as China pushes ahead with industrialization of the world’s largest hog herd, part of a 30-year effort to modernize its farm sector and create wealth in rural areas, companies are experimenting with high-rise housing for pigs despite the costs.

The “hotels” show how far some breeders are willing to go as China overhauls its farming model.

“There are big advantages to a high-rise building,” said Xu Jiajing, manager of Yangxiang’s mountain-top farm.

“It saves energy and resources. The land area is not that much but you can raise a lot of pigs.”

Companies like Yangxiang are pumping more money into the buildings — about 30 percent more than on single-story modern farms — even as hog prices in China hold at an eight-year low.

For some, the investments are too risky. Besides low prices that have smaller operations culling sows or rethinking expansion plans, there is worry about diseases spreading through such intensive operations.

But success for high-rise pig farms in China could have implications across densely populated, land-scarce Asia, as well as for equipment suppliers.

“We see an increasing demand for two- or three-level buildings,” said Peter van Issum, managing director of Microfan, a Dutch supplier that designed Yangxiang’s ventilation system.

Microfan also supplied a three-story breeding operation, Daedeok JongDon GGP Farm, in South Korea.

“The higher ones are still an exception, but the future might change rapidly,” van Issum said.

High-rise hogs

Yaji Mountain seems an unlikely location for a huge breeding farm. Up a narrow road, away from villages, massive concrete pig buildings overlook a valley of dense forest that Yangxiang plans to develop as a tourist attraction.

The site, however, is relatively close to Guigang, a city with a river port and waterway connections to the Pearl River Delta, one of the world’s most densely populated regions.

While Beijing is encouraging more livestock production in China’s grain basket in the northeast, many worry that farms there will struggle to get fresh pork safely to big cities thousands of miles away.

That has helped push some farm investments to southern provinces like Guangxi and Fujian, where land is hilly but much closer to many of China’s biggest cities.

Yangxiang will house 30,000 sows on its 11-hectare site by year-end, producing as many as 840,000 piglets annually. That will likely make it the biggest, most-intensive breeding farm globally. A more typical large breeding farm in northern China would have 8,000 sows on around 13 hectares.

In Fujian province, Shenzhen Jinxinnong Technology Co Ltd also plans to invest 150 million yuan ($24 million) in two five-story sow farms in Nanping. Two other companies are building high-rise hog farms in Fujian as well, according to an equipment firm involved in the projects.

Thai livestock-to-retail conglomerate CP Foods is also building four six-story pig units with local firm Zhejiang Huatong Meat Products Co in Yiwu, a Chinese city near the large populations around Shanghai.

High-tech complexity

Yangxiang spent 16,000 yuan per sow on its new farm, about 500 million yuan total, not including the cost of the pigs.

Building upward means higher costs and greater complexity, such as for piping feed into buildings, said Xue Shiwei, vice chief operations officer at Pipestone Livestock Technology Consultancy, a Chinese unit of a U.S. farm management company.

“It would save on land but increase the complexity of the structure, and costs for concrete or steel would be higher,” he said.

Health concerns also raise costs, because the risk of rampant disease — an ever-present problem in China’s livestock sector — is higher with more animals under one roof.

Even two-story farms in Europe have sparked worries that pigs will receive less care, said Irene Camerlink, an animal welfare expert at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna who has worked with Chinese farms.

Any outbreak of disease could lead to extensive culling, she said.

Farm manager Xu said Yangxiang reduces the risk of disease by managing each floor separately, with staff working on the same floor every day. New sows are introduced to a building on the top floor, and are then moved by elevator to an assigned level, where they remain.

The ventilation system is designed to prevent air from circulating between floors or to other buildings. Air enters through ground channels and passes through ventilation ducts on each level. The ducts are connected to a central exhaust on the roof, with powerful extraction fans pulling the air through filters and pushing it out of 15-meter high chimneys.

A waste treatment plant is still under construction on Yaji Mountain to handle the site’s manure. After treatment, the liquid will be sprayed on the surrounding forest, and solids sold to nearby farms as organic fertilizer.

The project’s additional equipment — much of it imported — to reduce disease, environmental impact and labor costs, significantly increased Yangxiang’s spending, the company said.

But after testing other models, Yangxiang concluded the multistory building was best. Others are less convinced.

“We need time to see if this model is do-able,” said Xue of the farm management firm, adding that he would not encourage clients to opt for “hog hotels.”

“There will be many new, competing ideas [about how to raise pigs in China],” Xue said, including high-rise farms. Eventually, “a suitable model will emerge.”

In Taking on High Drug Prices, Trump Faces a Complex Nemesis

Before taking office, President Donald Trump railed against the pharmaceutical industry and accused it of “getting away with murder.”

The populist rhetoric appears to be giving way to a more nuanced strategy focused on making the pharmaceutical market more open and competitive, with the aim of lowering costs for consumers.

It’s an approach that could avoid a direct confrontation with the powerful pharmaceutical lobby, but it could also underwhelm Americans seeking relief from escalating prescription costs.

On Friday, Trump is scheduled to give his first speech on an overarching plan to lower drug prices. Administration officials previewing the speech Thursday touted it as the most comprehensive plan to tackle prescription drug costs that any president has ever proposed, but offered few specifics.

Officials said the plan would increase competition, create incentives for drugmakers to lower initial prices and slash federal rules that make it harder for private insurers to negotiate lower prices. The result would be lower pharmacy costs for patients — a key Trump campaign promise.

The plan will not include giving the federal Medicare program power to directly negotiate prices with drugmakers, they noted. Trump campaigned on the idea, which is vigorously opposed by the pharmaceutical industry.

Public outrage over drug costs has been growing for years, because Americans are being squeezed in a number of ways: New medicines for cancer and other life-threatening diseases often launch with prices exceeding $100,000 per year. Drugs for common ailments like diabetes and asthma routinely see price hikes around 10 percent annually. Meanwhile some companies have been buying up once-cheap older drugs and hiking prices by 1,000 percent or more.

Since entering the White House, Trump has backed away from reforms directly targeting drugmakers and staffed his administration with appointees who have deep ties to the industry, including his health secretary, Alex Azar, a former top executive at Eli Lilly.

Still, administration officials ratcheted up the rhetoric ahead of Trump’s speech. Azar promised bold action. FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb — another Trump appointee with industry connections — hinted at a plan to “dismantle” the convoluted system of discounts and rebates between drugmakers and health care middlemen.

On Thursday, administration officials also vowed to address foreign governments that rely on U.S. medicines but pay drastically lower prices due to government controls. The U.S. accounts for 70 percent of the world’s brand-name drug profits, according to a White House report released earlier this year.

Here are some of the drivers of U.S. prescription drug prices, proposals for reducing the costs and what’s at stake:

Lack of regulation

Drugmakers generally can charge as much as the market will bear because the U.S. government doesn’t regulate medicine prices, unlike most other countries.

Medicare is the largest purchaser of prescription drugs in the nation, covering 60 million seniors and Americans with disabilities, but it is barred by law from directly negotiating lower prices with drugmakers. Democrats have long favored giving Medicare that power, but Republicans traditionally oppose the idea.

The powerful pharmaceutical lobby has repeatedly fended off proposals that could lower prices, such as Medicare negotiations or importing drugs from countries that regulate pricing.

With no direct government price regulation, the primary check on prices comes from buyers in bulk — such as insurance companies and pharmacy benefit managers, which handle prescription coverage for insurers, employers and other big clients.

But because there are so many players in the fragmented system, the discounts achieved in the U.S. are generally far more modest than those in other countries.

The result is that the U.S. spends more on medicines than any other nation. In 2015, the U.S. spent $1,162 per person on pharmaceuticals, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. That compares with $756 for Canada and $497 for the United Kingdom, both of which have government measures to control drug prices.

Lack of transparency

The U.S. system for pricing drugs is notoriously complex, so much that the “real” price for most medicines isn’t clear. Critics contend that this lack of transparency limits competition and drives prices higher.

Pharmaceutical companies often launch their drugs with high initial prices. But they argue list prices are merely a starting point for negotiations because they give substantial rebates and discounts to pharmacy benefit managers. Those price concessions are almost never disclosed and it’s unclear what portion actually flows back to consumers.

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb and others say the lack of transparency in the current system creates perverse incentives in which drugmakers and other health care companies benefit from rising prices — at the expense of patients.

Trump officials have suggested requiring Medicare pharmacy benefit managers to share rebate payments with patients. Another proposal would do away with rebates altogether to encourage more upfront discounts in Medicare.

But the benefit managers and insurers say that they use rebates to lower health care premiums overall and that doing away with them would drive up costs.

Patents and anti-competitive tactics

Patents last longer in the U.S. than most countries, typically giving companies a dozen years of competition-free marketing after a drug launches. Most drugmakers increase their prices annually during this monopoly period, and until recently double-digit price hikes were the norm.

Drugmakers also have developed a number of techniques to block competitors from launching lower-cost generic drugs. Companies often tweak drug formulations to extend their patents. In other cases, companies directly pay would-be competitors to stay off the market in so-called “pay-to-delay” deals.

Gottlieb has promised a crackdown on some of these techniques used to “game the system.” He’s highlighted a practice in which drugmakers use tightly controlled distribution systems to prevent rival manufacturers from purchasing their drug. This effectively blocks the development of generic versions because generic drugmakers must test their products against the original medicine before they can win FDA approval.

Public perception

A majority of Americans say bringing down prescription drug prices should be a “top priority” for Trump and Congress, according to recent polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

And experts who study drug pricing say it’s encouraging that the discussion around the issue has moved from outrage to sophisticated reforms. But some warn there is no guarantee that unraveling the current pricing-setting bureaucracy will lead to lower prices, because it all starts with drugmakers’ prices.

“Until we get closer to policy solutions that address the ability of drug manufacturers to set whatever price they want and increase prices year after year we may only be scratching the surface of this problem,” said Juliette Cubanski, a health care expert with the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.

Dan Mendelson, a health care consultant, said: “If they don’t address the cost that patients see at the pharmacy counter it’s not going to be seen as responsive.”

 

WHO Prepares for ‘Worst Case Scenario’ for DRC Ebola Outbreak

The World Health Organization said Friday it is preparing for “the worst case scenario” for an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

WHO said Thursday that between April 4 and May 5, twenty-seven cases of fever with hemorrhagic signs, including 17 deaths, were reported in the DRC’s Bikoro district.  WHO says two of the cases tested positive for the Ebola virus.

The DRC Ministry of Public Health has requested WHO’s support in coordinating the international and NGO response to the health crisis.

The full extent of the outbreak is not yet known, according to WHO, and the location presents “significant logistical challenges.”  The affected area is remote with limited communication and poor transportation infrastructure.

Ebola, named for the Congolese river near where it was first identified in 1976, begins with a sudden fever, aching muscles, diarrhea and vomiting. It is a hemorrhagic fever, marked by spontaneous bleeding from internal organs and, in most cases, death. It can be transmitted by close contact with infected animals or people, usually through blood or other bodily fluids.

People can contract the virus through direct contact with victims’ bodies at funerals. Caretakers, nurses and doctors treating Ebola patients also are at high risk.

WHO says the outbreak in Bikoro is the ninth outbreak of Ebola in the DRC since it first emerged in 1976. 

Climate Change Talks Stall Ahead of December 2018 Deadline

Two weeks of climate talks organized by the United Nations ended Thursday as countries failed to resolve differences about implementing the Paris climate accord.

The negotiations will resume in Bangkok in September, where an extra week’s meeting has now been scheduled.

The pact’s 197 signatories have set a December deadline to agree on the precise rules that countries have to stick to under the Paris agreement.

The lack of progress threatens to unravel three years’ worth of work to complete the Paris agreement, a landmark deal reached in 2015 that set a goal to limit fossil-fuel pollution in all nations for the first time and keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

Overall progress at the meeting in Bonn was very slow, with some countries such as China looking to renegotiate aspects of the Paris deal.

Patricia Espinosa, head of the U.N. agency that oversees climate talks, described the package being negotiated as “highly technical and complex.” It aims to ensure that the efforts countries claim they’re making in the fight against global warming can be verified and compared.

The administration of President Barack Obama was widely credited with helping to bring together the diverging interests of rich and poor countries in the drive to secure the Paris deal. His successor, President Donald Trump, withdrew the U.S. from the accord in June 2017. His administration has attacked climate science, saying it questions whether human activity is behind climate change, and is focused on boosting the fossil fuel industry.

Even Young Men Who Smoke Have Increased Stroke Risk

Young men who smoke are more likely to have a stroke before age 50 than their peers who avoid tobacco, a small study suggests.

Smoking has long been linked to an increased risk of stroke in older adults, but research to date examining this connection in younger adults has mainly focused on women. For the current study, researchers examined data on 615 men who had a stroke before age 50 and compared their smoking habits to a control group of 530 similar men who didn’t have a history of stroke.

Overall, current smokers were 88 percent more likely to have a stroke than men who never smoked, the study found.

Light smokers who had fewer than 11 cigarettes a day were 46 percent more likely to have a stroke. Heavy smokers with a two pack-a-day habit, or more, were over five times more likely to have a stroke.

‘Simple takeaway’

“The simple takeaway is the more you smoke, the more you stroke,” said lead study author Janina Markidan of the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore.

Smoking causes inflammation in blood vessels that increases the risk of blood clots forming, which in turn increases the risk of stroke, Markidan said by email.

“Although reducing the number of cigarettes smoked can reduce your risk of stroke, quitting is still the best choice for smokers,” Markidan added.

For the study, researchers focused on what’s known as an ischemic stroke, the most common kind, which occurs when a clot blocks an artery carrying blood to the brain.

Study has limitations

Among the stroke cases included in the study, 239 men had never smoked and 108 were former smokers. Another 103 men smoked less than 11 cigarettes daily, while 97 men smoked between 11 and 20 cigarettes a day and 40 men smoked 21 to 39 cigarettes daily.

An additional 28 men who had strokes smoked more than 40 cigarettes, or two packs, a day.

Most of the men who had strokes in the study were between 35 and 49 years old.

The study wasn’t a controlled experiment designed to prove whether or how smoking habits might directly influence the potential for a stroke in younger men.

Another limitation is that researchers lacked data on other tobacco products participants used in addition to cigarettes, which might influence their risk of stroke, researchers note in the journal Stroke.

Results hold true for younger smokers

The study team also lacked data on other factors that can independently influence the risk of stroke such as alcohol consumption or exercise habits.

Even so, the results suggest the link between smoking and strokes that is well established for older adults also holds true for younger smokers, said Allan Hackshaw, a researcher at University College London in the UK, who wasn’t involved in the study.

“It shows that smoking has a serious impact even when people are younger,” Hackshaw said by email. “Because treatments for stroke are much better now (fewer die from it straight away), many people who suffer one can have long-lasting consequences and physical disabilities at an age when they are usually expected to be working and physically active/fit.” 

People, Power Costs Keep Indoor Farming Down to Earth

There’s a budding industry that’s trying to solve the problem of the limp lettuce and tasteless tomatoes in America’s supermarkets.

It’s full of technologists who grow crops in buildings instead of outdoors, short-cutting the need to prematurely harvest produce for a bumpy ride often thousands of miles to consumers in colder climes.

 

More than 30 high-tech companies from the U.S. to Singapore hoping to turn indoor farming into a major future food source, if only they can clear a stubborn hurdle: high costs.

 

These companies stack plants inside climate-controlled rooms, parse out nutrients and water, and bathe them with specialized light. It’s all so consumers can enjoy tasty vegetables year-round using a fraction of the water and land that traditional farming requires. Farmers can even brag the produce is locally grown.

 

But real estate around cities is pricey. Electricity and labor don’t come cheap. And unlike specialty crops like newly legal marijuana, veggies rarely command premium prices. (It’s tough to compete with plants grown in dirt with free sunlight, after all.)

 

Even the best-funded indoor farming company on the planet — Plenty, which has raised nearly $230 million so far — has embraced a longtime farmers’ crutch: government handouts. It hasn’t found any takers yet.

 

“We believe society should consider investing in this new form of agriculture in the way it invested in agriculture in the 1940s,” said Plenty CEO Matt Barnard in a recent interview.

 

Barnard says public aid — in the form of cheaper power — is one way to turn a good but elusive idea into a sustainable venture.

 

Last year, the U.S. paid farmers $9.3 billion in direct support, and subsidized weather-related crop insurance to the tune of $5.1 billion. In a nutshell, Barnard argues that some of that money could be diverted to crops that grow in rain or shine.

 

Plenty grows kale, mixed greens, basil and natural sweetener stevia in a grey, low-rise warehouse complex in the industrial suburb of South San Francisco.

 

Visitors arriving via the back door must don full-body overalls and rubber boots dipped in disinfecting shoe baths before entering the air-tight workspace.

 

Seedlings are grown on flatbeds and bathed in purple light that gives them the look of a 3D movie watched without glasses. Maturing plants are stuffed into columns where they grow sideways, fed by drip irrigation, and irradiated by columns of light-emitting diodes.

 

The plants will be clipped and packaged before heading to stores later this year.

 

But there are some noticeable gaps in the menu. There are no carrots or tomatoes, because long roots that grow down and vines that require human pruning don’t do well on walls.

 

For indoor farms, making money has largely meant shipping in bulk to grocery stores, a conundrum if costs aren’t in line.

 

Investment in indoor farming soared to $271 million last year, up from just $36 million in 2016, according to market research firm Cleantech Group.

 

“The question is, how are they going to scale?” asks Pawel Hardej, CEO of Civic Farms, a vertical farming consultancy in Austin, Texas.

 

There have been plenty of indoor farming failures already.

 

FarmedHere shuttered its operations in Louisville, Kentucky, and Bedford Park, Illinois, in January last year due to cost overruns.

 

Georgia-based PodPonics, which filed for bankruptcy in 2016, cited labor costs as its biggest drag.

 

Google’s X, the search giant’s secretive “moonshot factory,” killed its indoor farming efforts because it couldn’t grow food staples like grains and rice.

 

Even fans of the technology aren’t sure it can beat another sheltered alternative: greenhouses.

 

“Vertical farming to a lot of [investors] is an ‘if’ and a ‘maybe’ versus a ‘when,'” says Cleantech adviser Yoachim Haynes. “The question that needs to be answered is, ‘Can they do it with cheaper electricity and cheaper labor?’ This is not a question that many have been able to answer.”

 

Barnard says Plenty can prosper if it spends 3 to 5 cents per kilowatt hour on power — well below the 10.4 cents that is the average price nationwide, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

 

While Plenty announced plans to build a 100,000 square-foot facility in the Seattle suburb of Kent in November, it said it isn’t in talks about power breaks with any U.S. city now.

 

Most public support has so far been in rebates for energy-efficient lighting, not running costs.

 

Seattle City Light provided $10,000 worth of energy-efficient lighting to an indoor growing facility that helped feed the city’s homeless. But it already offers the lowest power rate of the top 25 cities in America. “That’s the deal that’s on the table,” says spokesman Scott Thomsen.

 

Chicago provided some $344,000 in construction grants since 2008 to The Plant , a former pork processing plant that is home to multiple indoor farms.

 

While that helped with structural improvements, it didn’t help with operations, says John Edel, the president of Bubbly Dynamics LLC, which owns The Plant.

 

Supplying grocery stores in large volumes is “harder than it sounds,” he says. And other ways of obtaining cheap power — like The Plant’s plan to install a bio-gas guzzling turbine — have faced obstacles that make it uneconomical.

 

“There isn’t a whole lot in the way of incentives for farms here,” Edel says. “There needs to be.”

 

 

 

 

DRC Confirms Ebola Outbreak Near Border

Health officials in the Democratic Republic of Congo are racing to contain a new Ebola outbreak announced this week. At least two people are confirmed to have died of Ebola this month in a remote village of northwest DRC, very close to the border of the smaller, neighboring Republic of Congo.

The DRC’s health minister, Dr. Oly Ilunga, has been keeping people updated on social media, tweeting that on Thursday — some 24 hours after the initial announcement — a team of 12 experts landed in Mbandaka, the city closest to the outbreak.

Ilunga said that Ebola had been confirmed in two of 17 hemorrhagic fever deaths seen in recent weeks in the northwest village of Bikoro. The area has reported 21 cases of hemorrhagic fever in all.

 

“Our country,” he said in an open letter to the Congolese population, “is facing a new epidemic of Ebola that is a public health emergency of international concern.”

The World Health Organization has released $1 million from its emergency fund to respond to this outbreak. WHO and medical aid group Doctors Without Borders are leading the response, and have sent experts to the site.

“MSF’s DRC emergency team is already on site and has been supporting the Ministry of Health to deploy a rapid and tailored response to the emergency since last Saturday,” the group, known by its french acronym MSF, said in a statement. “MSF will continue to adapt its response according to the needs on the ground.”

The aid group declined to give more details, saying its experts were still gathering information.

 

‘This is not the first time’

This is not Congo’s first encounter with the hemorrhagic fever, which causes an acute, serious illness which is often fatal if left untreated. It is transmitted to people from wild animals and can be spread through human-to-human transmission.

Ebola derives its name from the place it was first discovered, the Ebola River, a tributary of the Congo River, in 1976. The average survival rate is 50 percent, according to the WHO.

 

WHO spokesman Tarik Jasarevic told VOA this is Congo’s ninth outbreak of Ebola since the virus was first identified, including one last year that he said “was contained relatively quickly.”

“So we are hoping to do the same thing this time around — to send quickly teams to the area where the virus has been confirmed to be circulating, to be in position to identify those who are sick, to be in position to identify those who have been potentially exposed, to put in place all those necessary measures that are used every time when there is an Ebola outbreak to try to stop the transmission as fast as possible,” he said.

This latest outbreak has occurred in an area near the banks of the Congo River, just across the border from the Republic of Congo. Because this region is poor in infrastructure, its many waterways are vital for transport and trade activities.

 

Ebola killed more than 11,000 people in a two-year epidemic that ravaged Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia between 2014 and 2016. So far, none of the recent outbreaks in Congo have been connected to that event.

The WHO’s Jasarevic said that to contain the newest outbreak, it is crucial that people in and around Bikoro cooperate with local health authorities.

“It is really important that communities in this particular area are engaged, are working together with authorities in terms of safe burial practices, in terms of proper contact tracing, to be compliant with those procedures,” he said. “The community engagement has been proven as a key component in successful containment of an Ebola outbreak.”

USGS: Explosive Eruptions Possible at Hawaii Volcano

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

104-Year-Old Hopes to Change Views on Assisted Suicide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Allowed for decades

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

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

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

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

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

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

Medical Teams Work to Contain Ebola Outbreak in DRC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new, experimental vaccine has been shown to be effective against the virus, although supplies are limited.

Tackling Rabies in Malawi, One Dog at a Time

A team of veterinarians has again traveled to southern Malawi to vaccinate thousands of dogs as part of a global effort by the British charity, Mission Rabies, to eradicate the deadly virus by 2030. Malawi has in the past reported elevated numbers of child deaths from rabies, but now three years into this initiative, the organizers say they are seeing signs of progress. Lameck Masina reports for VOA from Blantyre.

US Drug Supply Firm Execs: They Didn’t Cause Opioid Crisis

Top executives of the nation’s leading wholesale drug distributors told Congress under oath Tuesday that their companies didn’t help cause the nation’s deadly opioid epidemic, drawing bipartisan wrath that included one lawmaker suggesting prison terms for some company officials.

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

In some cases, they apologized.

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Major Review Backs Cervical Cancer Shots, Especially for Teens

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drugmakers GlaxoSmithKline and Merck make vaccines that protect against HPV.

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

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

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

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

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

104-Year-old Australian Promotes Right to Assisted Suicide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

17 Deaths Reported in Congo as Ebola Outbreak Confirmed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further downstream the river flows past Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital Kinshasa and Brazzaville, capital of neighboring Congo Republic – two cities with a combined population of over 12 million people.