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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A Falcon 9 rocket blasted off Wednesday carrying SpaceX’s first high-priority science mission for NASA, a planet-hunting space telescope whose launch had been delayed for two days by a rocket-guidance glitch.

The Transit Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, lifted off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 6:51 p.m. EDT, starting the clock on a two-year quest to detect more worlds circling stars beyond our solar system that might harbor life. 

The main-stage booster successfully separated from the upper stage of the rocket and headed back to Earth on a self-guided return flight to an unmanned landing vessel floating in the Atlantic.

The first stage, which can be recycled for future flights, then landed safely on the ocean platform, according to SpaceX launch team announcers on NASA TV.

Liftoff followed a postponement forced by a technical glitch in the rocket’s guidance-control system.
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Britain plans to ban the sale of plastic straws and other single-use products and is pressing Commonwealth allies to also take action to tackle marine waste, the office of Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May said.

It said drink stirrers and cotton buds would also be banned under the plans.

May has pledged to eradicate avoidable plastic waste by 2042 as part of a “national plan of action.”

“Plastic waste is one of the greatest environmental challenges facing the world, which is why protecting the marine environment is central to our agenda at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting,” May said in a statement ahead of a Commonwealth summit Thursday.

Leaders from the Commonwealth — a network of 53 countries, mostly former British colonies — are meeting in London this week.

May is looking to deepen ties to the Commonwealth as Britain seeks to boost trade and carve out a new role in the world ahead of the country’s departure from the European Union in March next year.

Britain will commit 61.4 million pounds ($87.21 million) at the summit to develop new ways of tackling plastic waste and help Commonwealth countries limit how much plastic ends up in the ocean.

“We are rallying Commonwealth countries to join us in the fight against marine plastic,” May said.

“Together we can effect real change so that future generations can enjoy a natural environment that is healthier than we currently find it.”

The statement said environment minister Michael Gove would launch a consultation later this year into the plan to ban the plastic items. It gave no details who the consultation would be with.
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Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has invested billions of dollars into tackling malaria. It has paid off. Deaths from the disease fell by more than 60 percent between 2000 and 2015, meaning 7 million lives were saved.

In 2016, however, that trend was reversed. There were more than 216 million reported cases in 91 countries — an increase of 5 million from the previous year.

On the sidelines of this week’s London Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, Gates told delegates, including several African leaders, the fight against malaria must be stepped up.

“If we do not keep innovating, we will go backwards,” he said. “If we do not maintain the commitments that we are making here today, malaria would go back up and kill over a million children a year, because the drugs and the insecticides are evaded by the mosquito and the parasite.”

WATCH: Fears Grow as Malaria Resurges; London Summit Urges Global Action

Malaria is estimated to cost the African economy more than $12 billion per year and consumes up to 40 percent of national health care budgets on the continent. Children and pregnant women are most severely affected.

Several factors

The increase in cases is caused by a number of factors, professor Alister Craig of the University of Liverpool’s School of Tropical Medicine said via Skype.

“We are seeing quite dramatic increases in the resistance to the insecticides that we use to control the insect vector populations, and that has been really the mainstay of the gains, and very remarkable gains, that we have seen over the last few years,” he said. “And we are just beginning to see that the parasites are starting to develop resistance to the drugs that we use to treat them.”

Craig added that the fight against malaria would most likely become harder.

“We have gained what might be called the easier gains, and now we have got the harder ones to do,” he said. “And they take even greater implementation and newer tools to allow us to look at where transmission is taking place.”

Such new tools cost money, but funding has plateaued. At the  Commonwealth conference, Britain pledged more than $2 billion to fight the disease, while Gates put forward another $1 billion and urged the international community to do more. 
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Malawi, which has one of the highest rates of the deadly HIV/AIDS infections, is on course to eradicate the virus, Jay Levy who co-discovered the AIDS virus 35 years ago said.

Most of the AIDS cases globally are in poorer countries, where access to testing, prevention and treatment is limited.

More than one million people in Malawi have the human immunodeficiency virus that causes AIDS, the U.N. AIDS agency (UNAIDS) says.

However, according to official figures, Malawi’s national HIV/AIDS prevalence dropped to 8.8 percent in 2016 from 30 percent in 1985 when the first HIV/Aids case was registered in Malawi.

Levy cited the Malawian government’s efforts in increasing access to treatment, mother to child transmission interventions, and awareness on prevention and treatment as some of the steps that are helping to fight the disease.

“Malawi is not a rich country, but has done a remarkable job of reducing HIV infections and deaths from AIDS,” Levy, a University of California researcher and renowned virologist and infectious disease expert told Reuters on a visit to Malawi.

“Malawi could be one of the countries in Africa on target to eradicating infection,” he added.

Levy delivered a lecture at College of Medicine in Blantyre, the nerve center for HIV/AIDS research in Malawi, and is touring HIV testing centers in the countryside.

Malawi is one of the world’s poorest countries, and the country’s economy depends on substantial inflows of economic assistance from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and individual donor nations.

In 2016, Malawi started testing the use of drones to speed up the time it takes to test infants living in rural areas for HIV, where poor roads and high transport costs often result in delays in testing that can prevent access to treatment.

Early diagnosis is important with HIV because it allows people to start treatment with AIDS drugs sooner, increasing their chances of living a long and healthy life.

Malawi now has a much lower HIV prevalence than some of its neighbors, UNAIDS says. South Africa has the biggest HIV epidemic in the world, with 7.1 million people living with HIV.

HIV prevalence is high among the general population at 18.9 percent.

Swaziland, a small landlocked country in southern Africa, has the highest HIV prevalence in the world, with 27.2 percent of their adult population living with HIV.

“There are still no real heroes to point at in Africa. But Senegal was the first country to really focus on the epidemic and reduce infections to a lower level,” he said. “South Africa is now catching up with the fight.”

Levy called on African governments to continue lobbying for more funding to direct towards eradicating HIV/AIDS.

“But let’s not also forget that if you can prevent infection, you don’t need more drugs for AIDS,” he said.

 
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Since 2000, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave approval to the world’s first robotic surgical system, almost 4,000 of these sophisticated machines have been deployed in operating suites around the world. Recognizing that the proficiency of the surgeons who use them can be subjective, a group of surgeons at the University of Southern California, in cooperation with the manufacturer Intuitive Research, is developing a system for more objective evaluation. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Renewed action and boosted funding to fight malaria could prevent 350 million cases of the disease in the next five years and save 650,000 lives across commonwealth countries, health experts said Wednesday.

Seeking to reignite efforts to wipe out the deadly mosquito-borne disease, philanthropists, business leaders and ministers from donor and malaria-affected countries pledged 2.7 billion pounds ($3.8 billion) to drive research and innovation and improve access to malaria prevention and treatments.

Spearheaded by Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Bill Gates, the leaders warned against complacency in fighting malaria — a disease that kills around half a million people, mainly babies and young children, each year.

While enormous progress has been made over the past 20 years in reducing malaria cases and deaths, in 2016, for the first time in a decade, the number of malaria cases was on the rise and in some areas there was a resurgence, according to the World Health Organization.

The disease’s stubbornness is partly due to the fact that the mosquito that transmits the disease and the parasite that causes it have developed resistance to the sprays and drugs used to fight them, health experts say. It is also partly due to stagnant global funding for fighting malaria since 2010. Climate change and conflict can also exacerbate malaria outbreaks.

“History has shown that with malaria there is no standing still — we move forward or risk resurgence,” Gates said in a statement ahead of a “Malaria Summit” in London on Wednesday.

​$1 billion extra pledged

His multibillion-dollar philanthropic fund, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is co-convening the summit, pledged an extra $1 billion through to 2023 to fund malaria research and development to try to end malaria for good.

“It’s a disease that is preventable, treatable and ultimately beatable, but progress against malaria is not inevitable,” Gates said. “We hope today marks a turning point.”

The malaria summit was designed to coincide with a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in London this week. The 53 Commonwealth countries, mostly former British colonies, are disproportionately affected by malaria — accounting for more than half of all global cases and deaths, although they are home to just a third of the world’s population.

Among new funding and research commitments announced at the summit, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria said $2 billion would be invested in 46 countries affected by malaria between 2018 and 2020.

Pharmaceutical firms GSK and Novartis also increased investment into malaria research and development — of 175 million pounds ($250 million) and $100 million, respectively. And five agrichemical companies launched a joint initiative to speed up development of new ways to control mosquitoes.
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The U.S. government on Tuesday proposed tightening rules governing the amount of prescription opioid painkillers that drugmakers can manufacture in a given year, in hopes of reining in the deadly opioid epidemic.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the Drug Enforcement Administration’s proposed changes to regulations covering addictive-drug manufacturing quotas. The plan could sharply reduce the annual production of painkillers.

“Under this proposed new rule, if DEA believes that a company’s opioids are being diverted for misuse, then they will reduce the amount of opioids that company can make,” Sessions said in prepared remarks.

The plan could affect opioid makers such as Purdue Pharma LP, Johnson & Johnson, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and Mallinckrodt, as well as companies that distribute the drugs.

Hours before the announcement, federal, state and local law enforcement officials in West Virginia announced a crackdown on an opioid trafficking ring in Huntington, known as “ground zero” for the epidemic.

West Virginia sued the DEA in December over drug quota rules, arguing the agency’s policy wrongfully sets manufacturing quotas based on amounts of pills drugmakers expect to sell, not legitimate medical needs.

That approach, the state argued, has contributed to the growing addiction problem and the illegal diversion of pain medication.

“We must end senseless death in West Virginia,” said the state’s attorney general, Patrick Morrisey. West Virginia is among the states that have suffered most from the crisis.

​National emergency declared

The Trump administration has made combating the opioid epidemic a top priority.

Last year, Trump declared it a national emergency, in a move to shore up more resources to expand access to treatment and give the government more flexibility in waiving rules and restrictions to expedite action.

Sessions has created an opioid task force and deployed prosecutors to hard-hit areas of the country with a mandate to bring more cases against traffickers.

While some enforcement efforts have focused on illicit traders and doctors who overprescribe, the government has also increasingly been taking aim at the drug companies themselves.

Recently, it sought permission from a federal court to participate in settlement negotiations aimed at resolving lawsuits by state and local governments against opioid manufacturers and distributors.

The DEA proposal calls for quotas to be set after considering the potential for diversion of the drugs into illicit channels, and weighing input from states and other federal agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Sessions said the DEA has also entered into a prescription drug information-sharing arrangement with 48 state attorneys general to help them sniff out criminals peddling dangerous painkillers.

According to the CDC, 42,000 people died nationwide from opioid overdoses in 2016, the last year with publicly available data.
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Wildlife managers in the American Southwest say a once-rare bat important to the pollination of plants used to produce tequila has made a comeback and is being removed from the U.S. endangered species list.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s announcement Tuesday made the lesser long-nosed bat, which ranges from Mexico to southern Arizona and New Mexico, the first bat ever removed from the nation’s list of threatened and endangered species.

The decision comes a year after first being proposed and three years after Mexico delisted the animal, which depends on the nectar of agaves, cactuses and other flowering plants.

It has taken 30 years of conservation efforts by biologists and volunteers in both countries as well as tequila producers and agave growers in Mexico to rebuild a healthy population.

There were once thought to be fewer than 1,000 lesser long-nosed bats in 14 known roosts throughout the region. Now, there are about 200,000 of the nectar-feeding animals and dozens of roost sites.

With the population trending upward, regional officials with the Fish and Wildlife Service say the science shows threats to the bat have been eliminated or reduced to the point where they can consider the species recovered.

In Mexico, tequila producers who rely on agaves are integrating more harvest and cultivation practices in recognition of the bats being key pollinators. Some are marketing “bat-friendly tequila.”

In southern Arizona, residents for a decade have monitored bats’ nighttime use of hummingbird feeders. It provided biologists with a clearer understanding of migration timing and allowed for the opportunity to capture bats and affix radio transmitters that aided in finding roost sites.

Scientists and state wildlife managers describe the delisting as a conservation success that resulted from decades of work.

“The story of the lesser long-nosed bat shows that conservation and science can work together to provide species the chance to recover and persist,” Winifred Frick, chief scientist at Bat Conservation International, said in a statement.

To ensure the bats continue to thrive, the Fish and Wildlife Service is preparing a monitoring plan that will focus on roosting sites and availability of forage.

Federal land managers in New Mexico and Arizona, including at the U.S. Army’s Fort Huachuca, already are including forage plants such as agaves, saguaros and other cactuses in their resource management plans to help the species.

Limiting human access to caves with roost sites and abandoned mines in the U.S. also has benefited bat populations.

Recovery efforts have included education aimed at changing attitudes about bats and improving identification of different species. Historically, the lesser long-nosed bat was a victim of campaigns to control vampire bats over rabies concerns and their effects on livestock.

In reviewing the species, biologists considered the potential effects that climate change may have on the “nectar trail” that the bats follow as they migrate. They say the bat is flexible and adaptive enough to remain viable under changing conditions.
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In a medical first, a French surgeon says he has performed a second face transplant on the same patient — who is now doing well and even spent a recent weekend in Brittany.

Dr. Laurent Lantieri of the Georges Pompidou hospital in Paris first transplanted a new face onto Jerome Hamon in 2010, when Hamon was in his mid-30s. But after getting ill in 2015, Hamon was given drugs that interfered with the anti-rejection medicines he was taking for his face transplant.

Last November, the tissue in his transplanted face began to die, leading Lantieri to remove it.

That left Hamon without a face, a condition that Lantieri described as “the walking dead.” Hamon had no eyelids, no ears, no skin and could not speak or eat. He had limited hearing and could express himself only by turning his head slightly, in addition to writing a little.

“If you have no skin, you have infections,” Lantieri told The Associated Press on Tuesday. “We were very concerned about the possibility of a new rejection.”

In January, when a second face donor for Hamon became available, Lantieri and his team performed a second face transplant. But before undergoing the second transplant, doctors had to replace all of the blood in Hamon’s body in a monthlong procedure to eliminate some potentially worrisome antibodies from previous treatments.

“For a man who went through all this, which is like going through a nuclear war, he’s doing fine,” Lantieri said. He added that Hamon is now being monitored like any other face transplant patient.

Hamon’s first face was donated by a 60-year-old. With his second transplanted face, Hamon said he managed to drop a few decades.

“I’m 43. The donor was 22. So I’ve become 20 years younger,” Hamon joked on French television Tuesday.

‘Hope’ for other patients

Other doctors applauded the French team’s efforts and said the techniques could be used to help critically ill patients with few options.

“The fact that Professor Lantieri was able to save this patient gives us hope that other patients can have a backup surgery if necessary,” said Dr. Frank Papay of the Cleveland Clinic. He said the techniques being developed by Lantieri and others could help doctors achieve what he called “the holy grail” of transplant medicine: How to allow patients to tolerate tissue transplants from others.

Dr. Bohdan Pomahac of Harvard University, who has done face transplants in the U.S., said similar procedures would ultimately become more common, with rising numbers of patients.

“The more we see what’s happening with [face transplant] patients, the more we have to accept that chronic rejection is a reality,” Pomahac said. “Face transplants will become essentially non-functional, distorted and that may be a good time to consider re-transplanting.”

He said it’s still unknown how long face transplants might last, but guessed they might be similar to kidneys, which generally last about 10 to 15 years.

“Maybe some patients will get lucky and their faces will last longer. But it will probably be more common that some will have to be replaced,” he said, noting there are still many unknowns about when chronic rejection might occur.

Lantieri said he and his team would soon publish their findings in a medical journal and that he hoped cases like Hamon would remain the exception.

“The other patients I’m following, some have had some alteration of their transplant over time, but they are doing fine,” he said. “I hope not to do any future transplants like this.”
…

Fragments of a meteorite that fell to Earth about a decade ago provide compelling evidence of a lost planet that once roamed our solar system, according to a study published Tuesday.

Researchers from Switzerland, France and Germany examined diamonds found inside the Almahata Sitta meteorite and concluded they were most likely formed by a proto-planet at least 4.55 billion years ago.

The diamonds in the meteorite, which crashed in Sudan’s Nubian Desert in October 2008, have tiny crystals inside them that would have required great pressure to form, said one of the study’s co-authors, Philippe Gillet.

“We demonstrate that these large diamonds cannot be the result of a shock but rather of growth that has taken place within a planet,” he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Switzerland.

Gillet, a planetary scientist at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, said researchers calculated a pressure of 200,000 bar (2.9 million psi) would be needed to form such diamonds, suggesting the mystery planet was as least as big as Mercury, possibly even Mars.

Scientists have long theorized that the early solar system once contained many more planets — some of which were likely little more than a mass of molten magma. One of these embryo planets — dubbed Theia — is believed to have slammed into a young Earth, ejecting a large amount of debris that later formed the moon.

“What we’re claiming here,” said Gillet, “is that we have in our hands a remnant of this first generation of planets that are missing today because they were destroyed or incorporated in a bigger planet.”

Addi Bischoff, a meteorite expert at the University of Muenster, Germany, said the methods used for the study were sound and the conclusion was plausible. But further evidence of sustained high pressure would be expected to be found in the minerals surrounding the diamonds, he said.

Bischoff wasn’t involved in the study, which was published in the journal Nature Communications.

This story has been corrected to show that the meteorite fragments fell to Earth about a decade ago, not more than a decade ago.
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More than 100 parts for U.S. space agency NASA’s deep-space capsule Orion will be made by 3-D printers, using technology that experts say will eventually become key to efforts to send humans to Mars.

U.S. defense contractor Lockheed Martin, 3-D printing specialist Stratasys, and engineering firm PADT have developed the parts using new materials that can withstand the extreme temperatures and chemical exposure of deep-space missions, Stratasys said Tuesday.

“In space, for instance, materials will build up a charge. If that was to shock the electronics on a space craft, there could be significant damage,” Scott Sevcik, Vice President Manufacturing Solutions at Stratasys told Reuters.

3-D printing, or additive manufacturing, has been used for making prototypes across a range of industries for many years, but is being increasingly eyed for scale production.

The technology can help make light-weight parts made of plastics more quickly and cheaply than traditional assembly lines that require major investments into equipment.

“But even more significant is that we have more freedom with the design … parts can look more organic, more skeletal,” Sevcik said.

Stratasys’ partner Lockheed Martin said the use of 3-D printing on the Orion project would also pay off at other parts of its business.

“We look to apply benefits across our programs — missile defense, satellites, planetary probes, especially as we create more and more common products,” said Brian Kaplun, additive manufacturing manager at Lockheed Martin Space.

Orion is part of NASA’s follow-up program to the now-retired space shuttles that will allow astronauts to travel beyond the International Space Station, which flies about 260 miles (420 km) above Earth.

The agency’s European counterpart, ESA, has suggested that moon rock and Mars dust could be used to 3-D print structures and tools, which could significantly reduce the cost of future space missions because less material would need to be brought along from Earth.
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U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders will introduce a bill on Tuesday that would fine opioid drug manufacturers for deceptive marketing and implement the harshest penalties yet on drugmakers found responsible for contributing to the drug epidemic.

Sanders, an independent who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, said the bill aimed to hold opioid manufacturers accountable for their role in the epidemic and force them to help pay for the crisis, which the White House

Council of Economic Advisers has estimated cost more than $500 billion in 2015.

The legislation, called the Opioid Crisis Accountability Act of 2018, would ban marketing that falsely suggests an opioid does not have addictive qualities or risks and would fine companies that are found liable for contributing to the epidemic $7.8 billion.

Companies that violate the marketing provision would be fined 25 percent of the profits from their opioid products.

The legislation would also create criminal liability for top executives of pharmaceutical companies that are found to have contributed to the epidemic.

“At a time when local, state and federal government are spending many billions of dollars a year, those people will be held accountable and asked to contribute to help us address the crisis,” Sanders said in an interview. “It shouldn’t just be the taxpayer that has to pay for the damage that they did.”

The bill does not yet have any co-sponsors, and with Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress and the White House, it is unlikely to move forward anytime soon.

More than 63,600 people died because of drug overdoses in 2016, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Congress has held several hearings on the opioid crisis in recent months and recently appropriated billions of dollars to address the epidemic. It is considering dozens of bills to address the crisis, but the legislation so far has been fairly limited in scope, including bills that address government policies and authorize the creation of grant programs.

Several states, including Ohio and Kentucky —  among the hardest hit by drug addiction — have filed lawsuits against opioid manufacturers for fueling the epidemic.

“The real legal struggles have taken place at the state level,” Sanders said. “It seems to me that it’s appropriate to take that fight… here to the federal government.”

 
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The European Union’s top court has ruled that Poland violated environmental laws with its massive logging of trees in one of Europe’s last pristine forests.

The ruling Tuesday by the European Court of Justice said that, in increasing logging in the Bialowieza Forest, Poland failed to fulfil its obligations to protect natural sites of special importance.

Poland had argued that felling the trees was necessary to fight the spread of bark beetle infestation.

Environmentalists say the large-scale felling of trees in Bialowieza was destroying rare animal habitats and plants, in violation of regulations. They held protests and brought the case before the court last year.

Poland has since replaced its environment minister and stopped the logging. Warsaw has said it will respect the EU court’s ruling. 

 
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Global warming is screwing up nature’s intricately timed dinner hour, often making hungry critters and those on the menu show up at much different times, a new study shows.

Timing is everything in nature. Bees have to be around and flowers have to bloom at the same time for pollination to work, and hawks need to migrate at the same time as their prey. In many cases, global warming is interfering with that timing, scientists said.

A first-of-its-kind global mega analysis on the biological timing of 88 species that rely on another life form shows that on average species are moving out of sync by about six days a decade, although some pairs are actually moving closer together. 

While other studies have looked at individual pairs of species and how warming temperatures have changed their migration, breeding and other timing, the study in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences gives the first global look at a worsening timing problem.

These changes in species timing are considerably greater than they were before the 1980s, the study said.

“There isn’t really any clear indication that it is going to slow down or stop in the near future,” said study lead author Heather Kharouba, an ecologist at the University of Ottawa. 

For example in the Netherlands, the Eurasian sparrow hawk has been late for dinner because its prey, the blue tit, has — over 16 years — arrived almost six days earlier than the hawk.

It’s most noticeable and crucial in Washington state’s Lake Washington, where over the past 25 years, plant plankton are now blooming 34 days earlier than the zooplankton that eat them. That’s crucial because that’s messing with the bottom of the food chain, Kharouba said.

In Greenland, the plants are showing up almost three days earlier than the caribou, so more of the baby caribou are dying “because there wasn’t enough food,” Kharouba said.

With warmer temperatures, most species moved their habits earlier, but interdependent species didn’t always move at the same rate. It’s the relative speed of changes in timing that’s key, Kharouba said.

Because of the small number of species involved in small areas over different studies, Kharouba’s team could not find a statistically significant link between temperature and changes in how species sync together. But what she saw, she said, “is consistent with climate change.”

Scientists not involved in the study praised the work.

“It demonstrates that many species interactions from around the world are in a state of rapid flux,” Boston University biology professor Richard Primack said in an email. “Prior to this study, studies of changing species interactions focused on one place or one group of species.”
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For the first time, a treatment that boosts the immune system greatly improved survival in people newly diagnosed with the most common form of lung cancer. It’s the biggest win so far for immunotherapy, which has had much of its success until now in less common cancers. 

In the study, Merck’s Keytruda, given with standard chemotherapy, cut in half the risk of dying or having the cancer worsen, compared to chemo alone after nearly one year. The results are expected to quickly set a new standard of care for about 70,000 patients each year in the United States whose lung cancer has already spread by the time it’s found.

Another study found that an immunotherapy combo — the Bristol-Myers Squibb drugs Opdivo and Yervoy — worked better than chemo for delaying the time until cancer worsened in advanced lung cancer patients whose tumors have many gene flaws, as nearly half do. But the benefit lasted less than two months on average and it’s too soon to know if the combo improves overall survival, as Keytruda did.

All of these immune therapy treatments worked for only about half of patients, but that’s far better than chemo has done in the past.

“We’re not nearly where we need to be yet,” said Dr. Roy Herbst, a Yale Cancer Center lung expert who had no role in the studies.

Results were discussed Monday at an American Association for Cancer Research conference in Chicago and published by the New England Journal of Medicine. The studies were sponsored by the drugmakers, and many study leaders and Herbst consult for the companies.

About the drugs

Keytruda, Yervoy and Opdivo are called checkpoint inhibitors. They remove a cloak that some cancer cells have that hides them from the immune system. The drugs are given through IVs and cost about $12,500 a month.

Keytruda was approved last year as an initial treatment with chemo for the most common form of advanced lung cancer, but doctors have been leery to use it because that was based on a small study that did not show whether it prolongs life.

The new study, led by Dr. Leena Gandhi of NYU’s Perlmutter Cancer Center, gives that proof. In it, 616 patients were given chemo and some also received Keytruda. Those not given Keytruda were allowed to switch to it if their cancer worsened.

After one year, 69 percent of people originally assigned to Keytruda were alive versus 49 percent of the others — a result that experts called remarkable considering that the second group’s survival was improved because half of them wound up switching.

How much it ultimately will extend life isn’t known — more than half in the Keytruda group are still alive; median survival was just over 11 months for the others.

The Keytruda combo also delayed the time until cancer worsened — an average of nine months versus five months for the chemo-only group.

That’s a big difference for such an advanced cancer, said Dr. Alice Shaw, a Massachusetts General Hospital lung cancer expert and one of the conference leaders. “This is really a pivotal study … a new standard of care,” said Shaw, who has no ties to the drugmakers.

Rates of serious side effects were similar, but twice as many in the Keytruda group dropped out because of them. More than 4 percent of that group developed lung inflammation and three patients died of it.

The competition

Dr. Matthew Hellmann of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York led a study testing the Opdivo-Yervoy combo versus chemo in a slightly different group of newly diagnosed advanced lung cancer patients.

The study design was changed after it was under way to look at results according to patients’ tumor mutation burden — a measure of how flawed their cancer genes are, according to a profiling test by Foundation Medicine. Medicare recently agreed to cover the $3,000 test for advanced cancers.

Of 679 patients, 299 had a high number of gene flaws in their tumors. In that group, survival without worsening of disease was 43 percent after one year for those on the immunotherapy drugs versus 13 percent of those on chemo. The immunotherapy drugs did not help people with fewer tumor gene flaws.

“We have a tool that helps us determine who are the patients that are most likely to benefit from this combination,” Hellmann said.

The median time until cancer worsened was about 7 months on the immunotherapy drugs versus 5.5 months for chemo. Serious side effects were a little more common in the chemo group.

Another rival, Genentech, recently announced that its checkpoint inhibitor, Tecentriq, improved survival in a study similar to the one testing Keytruda. Details are expected in a couple of months.
…

Scientists in Britain and the United States say they have engineered a plastic-eating enzyme that could help in the fight against pollution.

The enzyme is able to digest polyethylene terephthalate, or PET — a form of plastic patented in the 1940s and now used in millions of tons of plastic bottles. PET plastics can persist for hundreds of years in the environment and currently pollute large areas of land and sea worldwide.

Researchers from Britain’s University of Portsmouth and the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory made the discovery while examining the structure of a natural enzyme thought to have evolved in a waste-recycling center in Japan.

Finding that this enzyme was helping a bacteria to break down, or digest, PET plastic, the researchers decided to “tweak” its structure by adding some amino acids, said John McGeehan, a professor at Portsmouth who co-led the work.

This led to a serendipitous change in the enzyme’s actions — allowing its plastic-eating abilities to work faster.

“We’ve made an improved version of the enzyme better than the natural one already,” McGeehan told Reuters in an interview.

“That’s really exciting because that means that there’s potential to optimize the enzyme even further.”

The team, whose finding was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal, is now working on improving the enzyme further to see if it could be capable of breaking down PET plastics on an industrial scale.

“It’s well within the possibility that in the coming years we will see an industrially viable process to turn PET, and potentially other [plastics], back into their original building blocks so that they can be sustainably recycled,” McGeehan said.

‘Strong potential’

Independent scientists not directly involved with the research said it was exciting, but cautioned that the enzyme’s development as a potential solution for pollution was still at an early stage.

“Enzymes are non-toxic, biodegradable and can be produced in large amounts by microorganisms,” said Oliver Jones, a Melbourne University chemistry expert. “There is strong potential to use enzyme technology to help with society’s growing waste problem by breaking down some of the most commonly used plastics.”

Douglas Kell, a professor of bioanalytical science at Manchester University, said further rounds of work “should be expected to improve the enzyme yet further.”

“All told, this advance brings the goal of sustainably recyclable polymers significantly closer,” he added.
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Gesturing towards the White House, home to President Donald Trump who has called himself “a very stable genius,” Isaac Newton begged to differ.

“Knowing many geniuses, and being one myself, I would venture to say that was rather a boastful claim on his part,” said “Newton,” actually Dean Howarth, a Virginia high school physics teacher in period dress.

Howarth was among hundreds of people who turned out to a “March for Science” Saturday in Washington to “create tangible change and call for greater accountability of public officials to enact evidence-based policy,” according to organizers.

That was the formal message of the rally, one of more than 200 events being carried out around the world. 

But as keynote speaker Sheila Jasanoff said, the signs carried by people like Howarth told a more direct and simple story.

Many of those messages, while more restrained than Howarth’s, carried implicit criticism of Trump, who withdrew from the global Paris Agreement on climate change, has defended coal-fired power plants, seeks to roll back environmental regulations, and has yet to name his top science advisor.

“Make America Smart Again,” said a placard carried by one demonstrator, giving an alternative take on Trump’s “Make America Great Again” pledge.

“We’re here because no one wants to be led by the gut feelings of our elected officials,” Jasanoff, a Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Harvard, said in her opening address without specifically referring to Trump’s widely-reported tendency to govern by instinct rather than analysis.

“Good science depends on good democracy. Let me repeat: good science needs good democracy,” she said.

David Titley, a retired rear admiral who led the US Navy’s task force on climate change, told the crowd that science shows we need to “take actions now to avoid the worst of the risks we know are highly likely to appear.”

Many in the crowd listened under the shade of cherry blossom trees beneath the Washington Monument on the first summer-like Saturday of the year.

“Science is what separates facts from fallacies, falsehoods and fanaticism,” Titley said. “If we ignore and denigrate science we do so at our own peril.”

Suzelle Fiedler, 44, a former laboratory worker, told AFP she attended the rally because of the administration’s desire to cut research funding, and “they’re dismissing a lot of scientific facts like climate change.”

Steven Schrader’s sign proclaimed that he is not a “mad scientist. I’m furious.”

Schrader, 66, told AFP the administration “is trying to essentially take science out of decision making.”
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Auntie Caterina is a regular taxi driver, who offers free rides to cancer patients in the Italian city of Florence. She inherited the taxi when her partner died of cancer 17 years ago and says this is a way to honor his legacy. To show gratitude and support of the Tuscany Region, she was recognized for her work last month as its “Solidarity Ambassador”. VOA Correspondent Mariama Diallo reports.
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The search for new worlds outside our solar system will enter a new phase (April 16), when NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, takes off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are working with NASA on the mission. Faith Lapidus reports.
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Rural communities in United States and elsewhere often use portable backup electricity generators in case of power outages. But these machines can be costly to run for longer times and require periodic attendance. A team from West Virginia University is developing a small, natural gas-powered generator that will be able to run for years. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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A key decision on whether to place a $1.4 billion telescope in Hawaii to further astronomy research has been delayed, leaving open the possibility the project may be moved to Spain, a panel said Friday.

The board of governors for the project dubbed the Thirty Meter Telescope International Observatory still wants to build the telescope on its preferred site of Mauna Kea, a mountain in Hawaii.

But an alternative location in Spain’s Canary Islands remains under consideration, the board said in a statement after meeting this week to discuss legal and regulatory challenges to the Hawaii telescope plan that could last years.

“We continue to assess the ongoing situation as we work toward a decision,” said Ed Stone, the executive director of the observatory.

He said no decision could be made on where to put the telescope “until we have a place to go, and we don’t decide when we have a place to go — that’s decided by the courts and agencies.”

Dormant volcano

The 30-meter (98 feet) diameter telescope would be placed on one side of Mauna Kea and is far more advanced than the world’s largest current telescopes that measure 10 meters (32 feet) in diameter. The new telescope could potentially allow scientists to make groundbreaking discoveries about black holes, exoplanets, celestial bodies, and even detect indications of life on other planets. 

Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano and Hawaii’s tallest mountain, was selected in July 2009 as the target location for the telescope after a five-year search.

Scientists called it the best site in the world for astronomy, given a stable, dry, and cold climate, which allows for sharp images. The atmosphere over the mountain also provides favorable conditions for astronomical measurements, according to the TMT website.

The island of La Palma in the Canary Islands, which already has an astronomical observatory, is considered a viable alternative. But scientists have said the telescope’s design would have to be altered for more adaptive optics given the mountain site’s lower altitude and different climate. That means it would take scientists more time to achieve the same discoveries they could make at Mauna Kea, Stone said.

Years of debate

The Hawaii site has been subject to years of public debate and legal challenges. Researchers say it will help usher in scientific and economic developments, while opponents maintain it will hurt the environment and desecrate land considered sacred by some Native Hawaiians. Mauna Kea already houses a number of high-powered telescopes at its summit. 

“Thirty years of astronomy development has resulted in adverse significant impact to the natural and cultural resources of Mauna Kea,” said Kealoha Pisciotta, president of Mauna Kea Anaina Hou, an indigenous, Native Hawaiian group that works on environmental issues. “Trying to build more would have added to the cumulative impact.” 

On Thursday, the Hawaii Senate approved a bill to ban new construction atop Mauna Kea, and included a series of audits and other requirements before the ban could be lifted. But House leaders said they don’t have plans to advance the bill. Democratic House Speaker Scott Saiki told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser that the “bill is dead on arrival in the House.” 

There are also two appeals before the Hawaii Supreme Court. One challenges the sublease and land use permit issued by the Hawaii Board of Land and Natural Resources. The other has been brought by a Native Hawaiian man who says use of the land interferes with his right to exercise cultural practices and is thus entitled to a case hearing. 

The telescope project is a collaboration among universities in the U.S. and California, including the University of Hawaii and national science and research institutes of Japan, China, and India. 

“It’s a privilege to practice astronomy on Mauna Kea and we’re not satisfied with where we’re at right now,” Dan Meisenzahl, a spokesperson for the University of Hawaii, said in a statement. “We will continue to push ourselves to improve our stewardship of the mountain.” 

 AP-WF-04-13-18 2343GMT
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Scientists will leave their labs and march on Washington and more than 200 other cities around the world Saturday, protesting government policies on issues from climate change to gun violence that they say ignore scientific evidence.

It comes a year after the first March for Science, three months into the Trump administration, when researchers feared that science would be pushed aside in the new president’s zeal to eliminate government regulations.

WATCH: Rough Year in Science Policy Brings Researchers Back to March

This year, “I think our worst fears are coming to fruition,” said Chris Zarba, who retired in February as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency’s science advisory board staff office. Those panels evaluate the evidence guiding decisions on government environmental regulations.

EPA woes

Last October, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt issued a directive that changed the rules governing membership on those panels.

Pruitt barred researchers who had received EPA grants. He said agency funding could compromise their objectivity.

“Whatever science comes out of EPA shouldn’t be political science,” Pruitt said in a statement. “From this day forward, EPA advisory committee members will be financially independent from the agency.”

But scientists with funding from the industries EPA regulates are not held to the same standard, Zarba said.

“Nobody believes now that those panels are independent,” he added.

As the Trump administration undoes what it calls job-killing regulations on climate change, air and water pollution, pesticides and more, Zarba said industry has a voice but science does not.

“Human health and the environment will suffer,” he said.

It’s one reason Zarba said he would be marching Saturday.

Politics and science

But march organizers say the attacks on science did not start with the Trump administration. For decades, they say, ideology has overtaken evidence on issues in women’s health, gun violence and other controversial subjects.

“This isn’t a new phenomenon,” said March for Science Interim Executive Director Caroline Weinberg. “We reached a tipping point. But these protests should have been happening for years.”

In a polarized country, however, the march walks a fine line. 

“I’m always cautious about trying to politicize something as important as science,” said Rob Young, director for the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina.

“Certainly, scientists have had a rough go for the last year,” he added, and a march advocating for science is fine. “But to the extent that that’s incorporated with political messages, or slings and arrows against the president or members of his administration, then that’s a little bit more problematic.”

​Fired up

It’s Trump administration policies that have scientists fired up, however, from withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement to loosening air and water pollution rules.

“There’s no question that there’s fear and anxiety, given the elections of 2016,” said Chris McEntee, executive director of the American Geophysical Union, the professional society representing Earth and space scientists. 

She said that in the eight years she has been with AGU, it has become easier to get members to speak up on policy issues. 

“What we’re seeing is scientists coming to us to want to engage,” McEntee said.

More members are writing letters to elected officials and getting training on communicating science to policymakers and the public, she said. New programs AGU launched to help scientists communicate are overflowing.

And they are scoring some victories. Science agencies got a raise in the latest federal budget. 

“It’s been a very long time, actually, since we had significant increases,” McEntee noted.

New issues

Scientists are wading into controversial issues that many had previously avoided.

This year, March for Science organizers rallied support to lift a ban on gun violence research. Weinberg said they debated whether the issue was too partisan for the group to weigh in on. But they decided that it was more important to support research that would help policymakers make good decisions.

“It’s only partisan because we’ve let that become the conversation,” she said. “Pushing against that, I think, is one of the most vital roles we can play.”
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If cancer is suspected in a patient, surgeons, in most cases, would have to cut some of the suspected tissue out and test it. Getting the results could be a long process. A new invention called a MasSpec Pen could cut the wait time to just seconds. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee reports from Austin, Texas, where the pen was created.
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