Around the world, one in three people suffer from something known as “hidden hunger.” Their bellies may be full, but the food they are eating is not nutritious. A San Francisco food technology firm is working in Liberia to see if it can make a popular Liberian dish more nutritious. Michelle Quinn reports.
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A new super-material — stronger, lighter and cheaper than steel — has emerged from scientists’ labs. It’s not a high-tech nano-polymer or some new alloy. It’s wood. VOA’s Steve Baragona has more.
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The majority of people believe cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is successful more often than it tends to be in reality, according to a small U.S. study.
This overly optimistic view, which may partly stem from seeing happy outcomes in television medical dramas, can get in the way of decision-making and frank conversations about end of life care with doctors, the research team writes in American Journal of Emergency Medicine.
CPR is intended to restart a heart that has stopped beating, known as cardiac arrest, which is typically caused by an electrical disturbance in the heart muscle. Although a heart attack is not the same thing — it occurs when blood flow to the heart is partly or completely blocked, often by a clot — a heart attack can also cause the heart to stop beating.
Odds of surviving
Whatever the cause of cardiac arrest, restarting the heart as quickly as possible to get blood flowing to the brain is essential to preventing permanent brain damage. More often than not, cardiac arrest ends in death or severe neurological impairment.
The overall rate of survival that leads to hospital discharge for someone who experiences cardiac arrest is about 10.6 percent, the study authors note. But most participants in the study estimated it at more than 75 percent.
“The majority of patients and non-medical personnel have very unrealistic expectations about the success of CPR as well as the quality of life after patients are revived,” said lead author Lindsey Ouellette, a research assistant at Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine in Grand Rapids.
Patients and family members should know about the realistic success rate and survival numbers when planning a living will and considering a “Do Not Resuscitate” order, Ouellette said.
“We think it is best to have the latest and most accurate information when dealing with this life-impacting decision, whether or not to undertake or continue CPR,” she told Reuters Health in an email.
Good TV, not good information
To gauge perceptions of CPR, the researchers surveyed 1,000 adults at four academic medical centers in Michigan, Illinois and California. Participants included non-critically ill patients and families of patients, who were interviewed during random hospital shifts.
In addition to asking about general knowledge of CPR and personal experiences with CPR, the researchers presented participants with several scenarios and asked them to estimate the likelihood of CPR success and patient survival in each case.
One scenario involved a 54-year-old who suffered a heart attack at home and required CPR by paramedics. About 72 percent of the survey participants predicted survival and 65 percent predicted a complete neurological recovery.
In a scenario describing a trauma-related cardiac arrest in an 8-year-old, 71 percent predicted CPR success and 64 percent predicted long-term survival of the child.
“Many people felt if a person was successfully revived, they would return to ‘normal’ rather than possibly needing lifelong care,” Ouellette said.
At the same time, more than 70 percent of respondents said they watched TV medical dramas regularly, and 12 percent said these shows were a reliable source of health information.
“Tempering unrealistic expectations may not make for ‘good TV,’ but perhaps we can get a better idea of just how these dramas may impact the views people hold about CPR and other aspects of medicine,” she said.
Medical act, not miracle
“People think about CPR as a miracle, but it’s another medical act,” said Dr. Juan Ruiz-Garcia of Hospital Universitario de Torrejon in Madrid who wasn’t involved in the study. “I’m not really sure what people would choose if they knew the real prognosis of it,” he told Reuters Health by phone.
CPR should be part of the conversation about end-of-life care and advanced directives among families, said Carolyn Bradley of Yale-New Haven Hospital in Connecticut.
“When doing CPR at a hospital, we tend to move the family away, but we’ve created a situation where families may not be there for the final moments,” she said in a phone interview.
“Have a critical conversation with your health care provider and go with questions about what would happen during CPR,” she said. “What does it look like? What happens to my body? Who will be around? It could be the end-of-life. Statistically, it is.”
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There is no clear and easy way to tell when a person’s thinking process has peaked, but most scientists agree that intelligence starts slowly deteriorating somewhere around age 70. However, some individuals’ minds stay sharp well beyond that age and researchers would like to know why. VOA’s George Putic reports.
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Some diabetics with plaque buildup in their arteries might have less debris in these blood vessels after adding wine to their diets, a recent study suggests.
For the study, researchers examined data on 224 people with type 2 diabetes who normally didn’t drink alcohol, but were randomly assigned to follow a Mediterranean diet and drink approximately one glass of red wine, white wine or water for daily. Among the subset of 174 people with ultrasound images of their arteries, 45 percent had detectable plaque at the start of the study.
Two years later, researchers didn’t see any significant increase in plaque for any of the participants with ultrasounds, regardless of whether they drank wine or water.
However, among the people who started out with the most plaque in their arteries, there was a small but statistically meaningful reduction in these deposits by the end of the study, researchers report in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
“Among patients with well-controlled diabetes and a low risk for alcohol abuse, initiating moderate alcohol consumption in the context of a healthy diet is apparently safe and may modestly reduce cardiometabolic risk,” said lead study author Rachel Golan, a public health researcher at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer Sheva, Israel.
“Our study is not a call for all patients with type 2 diabetes to start drinking,” Golan said by email.
Cardio-metabolic risk factors can increase the chances of having diabetes, heart disease or a stroke. In addition to plaque in the arteries, other risk factors include high blood pressure, elevated blood sugar, high cholesterol, smoking and having poor diet and exercise habits.
Previous research
Some previous research has linked drinking moderate amounts of wine or other alcohol to a lower risk of cardiovascular disease in otherwise healthy people as well as diabetics.
In the current study, all of the participants had the most common form of the disease, known as type 2 diabetes, which is linked to obesity and aging and occurs when the body can no longer produce or use the hormone insulin to convert sugars in the blood into energy.
Participants were part of a larger study looking at people with cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
They were typically in their late 50s or early 60s and most of them were overweight or obese. Roughly 65 to 70 percent of them took medications to lower cholesterol or other blood fats and the majority of them also took diabetes drugs to control blood sugar.
Mediterranean diet
Patients were told to follow a Mediterranean diet, which typically includes lots of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes and olive oil. This diet also tends to favor lean sources of protein like chicken or fish over red meat, which contains more saturated fat.
Participants were provided with wine or mineral water throughout the study period along with a 150-milliliter (5.07-ounce) glass to measure their daily dose of their assigned beverage, which was consumed with dinner.
Some previous research has linked a Mediterranean diet to weight loss and a reduced risk of heart disease and some cancers as well as better management of blood sugar in people with diabetes.
One limitation of the current study is the potential for the apparent beneficial effect of the wine to have been at least partially caused by the Mediterranean diet.
Another drawback is that researchers only had ultrasound images of plaque buildup for a small proportion of patients, and the two-year follow up period might not be long enough to detect meaningful differences in plaque accumulation.
There is a risk
Alcohol may help, but it also isn’t risk free, noted Dr. Gregory Marcus, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who wasn’t involved in the study. It can increase the risk of heart rhythm problems, which can cause stroke, Marcus said by email.
Even though alcohol might help reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease in some circumstances, there isn’t enough evidence yet to suggest that people who avoid alcohol should start drinking, Marcus said.
“I would certainly recommend against starting to drink alcohol in the hopes of obtaining beneficial health effects among anyone that currently abstains,” Marcus said. “And among those who drink, these sorts of positive results should never be used to consume more alcohol, particularly beyond drinking in moderation.”
Australian scientists, inspired by NASA space experiments, have pioneered a new method of growing crops, known as “speed breeding,” which has the potential to help feed the world’s growing population. Faith Lapidus reports.
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Retired Marine Corps Sgt. John Peck lost all four of his limbs in an explosion in Afghanistan in 2010, but unlike many people who suffer such losses, Peck does not have to rely on prosthetic arms. Doctors performed a successful double arm transplant and now he is undergoing occupational and physical therapy at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. VOA’s Yahya Barzinji visited him and filed this report narrated by Jeff Custer.
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It’s pretty extraordinary for people in their 80s and 90s to keep the same sharp memory as someone several decades younger, and now scientists are peeking into the brains of these “superagers” to uncover their secret.
The work is the flip side of the disappointing hunt for new drugs to fight or prevent Alzheimer’s disease.
Instead, “why don’t we figure out what it is we might need to do to maximize our memory?” said neuroscientist Emily Rogalski, who leads the SuperAging study at Chicago’s Northwestern University.
Parts of the brain shrink with age, one of the reasons why most people experience a gradual slowing of at least some types of memory late in life, even if they avoid diseases like Alzheimer’s.
But it turns out that superagers’ brains aren’t shrinking nearly as fast as their peers’. And autopsies of the first superagers to die during the study show they harbor a lot more of a special kind of nerve cell in a deep brain region that’s important for attention, Rogalski told a recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
These elite elders are “more than just an oddity or a rarity,” said neuroscientist Molly Wagster of the National Institute on Aging, which helps fund the research. “There’s the potential for learning an enormous amount and applying it to the rest of us, and even to those who may be on a trajectory for some type of neurodegenerative disease.”
What does it take to be a superager? A youthful brain in the body of someone 80 or older. Rogalski’s team has given a battery of tests to more than 1,000 people who thought they’d qualify, and only about 5 percent pass. The key memory challenge: Listen to 15 unrelated words, and a half-hour later recall at least nine. That’s the norm for 50-year-olds, but the average 80-year-old recalls five. Some superagers remember them all.
“It doesn’t mean you’re any smarter,” stressed superager William “Bill” Gurolnick, who turns 87 next month and joined the study two years ago.
Nor can he credit protective genes: Gurolnick’s father developed Alzheimer’s in his 50s. He thinks his own stellar memory is bolstered by keeping busy. He bikes, and plays tennis and water volleyball. He stays social through regular lunches and meetings with a men’s group he co-founded.
“Absolutely that’s a critical factor about keeping your wits about you,” exclaimed Gurolnick, fresh off his monthly gin game.
Rogalski’s superagers tend to be extroverts and report strong social networks, but otherwise they come from all walks of life, making it hard to find a common trait for brain health. Some went to college, some didn’t. Some have high IQs, some are average. She’s studied people who’ve experienced enormous trauma, including a Holocaust survivor; fitness buffs and smokers; teetotalers and those who tout a nightly martini.
But deep in their brains is where she’s finding compelling hints that somehow, superagers are more resilient against the ravages of time.
Early on, brain scans showed that a superager’s cortex – an outer brain layer critical for memory and other key functions – is much thicker than normal for their age. It looks more like the cortex of healthy 50- and 60-year-olds.
It’s not clear if they were born that way. But Rogalski’s team found another possible explanation: A superager’s cortex doesn’t shrink as fast. Over 18 months, average 80-somethings experienced more than twice the rate of loss.
Another clue: Deeper in the brain, that attention region is larger in superagers, too. And inside, autopsies showed that brain region was packed with unusual large, spindly neurons – a special and little understood type called von Economo neurons thought to play a role in social processing and awareness.
The superagers had four to five times more of those neurons than the typical octogenarian, Rogalski said – more even than the average young adult.
The Northwestern study isn’t the only attempt at unraveling long-lasting memory. At the University of California, Irvine, Dr. Claudia Kawas studies the oldest-old, people 90 and above. Some have Alzheimer’s. Some have maintained excellent memory and some are in between.
About 40 percent of the oldest-old who showed no symptoms of dementia in life nonetheless have full-fledged signs of Alzheimer’s disease in their brains at death, Kawas told the AAAS meeting.
Rogalski also found varying amounts of amyloid and tau, hallmark Alzheimer’s proteins, in the brains of some superagers.
Now scientists are exploring how these people deflect damage. Maybe superagers have different pathways to brain health.
“They are living long and living well,” Rogalski said. “Are there modifiable things we can think about today, in our everyday lives” to do the same?
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Under the bright sun of a remote desert in Oman, a group of astronauts and scientists is simulating Life on Mars. They hope their experiments today will pave the way for an actual trip to Mars, the red planet, within decades. Faiza Elmasry has this story narrated by Faith Lapidus.
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Cigarettes are not the only type of tobacco products that can lead to premature death or fatalities from smoking-related cancers, a U.S. study confirms.
While people who exclusively smoke cigarettes have twice the risk of premature death from all causes compared to people who avoid tobacco altogether, exclusive cigar smokers have a 20 percent higher risk of early death, researchers report in JAMA Internal Medicine.
When it comes to fatalities from specific cancers that have been tied to tobacco use, cigarette smokers have four times the risk of people who never used tobacco, but cigar smokers are 61 percent more likely to die of these cancers and pipe users have 58 percent higher odds.
“We knew exclusive users of cigars and pipes were at greater risk of disease than people who do not use tobacco,” said lead study author Carol Christensen of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Tobacco Products. “However, this study provides information that reflects today’s patterns of tobacco use.”
These data “underscore the importance of complete quitting,” Christensen said by email.
For the study, researchers examined nationally representative survey data, collected starting in 1985, from 357,420 participants who were followed through 2011.
Overall, 203,071 people, or about 57 percent, never used tobacco at all. Another 57,251 participants were current daily cigarette smokers, while 9,414 said they had a less frequent habit and 77,773 were former cigarette smokers.
In addition, 531 people were current daily cigar smokers, while 608 individuals used cigars less frequently and 2,398 had quit.
For pipes, 1,099 participants had a current daily habit, while 78 people used pipes less often and 5,237 had quit.
During the study period, 51,150 people died of all causes.
With a daily cigarette, cigar or pipe habit, people had an elevated risk of death from tobacco-related cancers including malignancies of the bladder, esophagus, larynx, lung, mouth and throat, and pancreas.
Nondaily users
Even with a nondaily cigarette habit, people were more than six times more likely to die of lung cancer than individuals who never used tobacco. They also had more than seven times the risk of dying from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, more than four times the odds of death from oral cancers, and 43 percent higher odds of death from a circulatory system disorder.
Current cigar smokers had more than three times the odds of dying of lung cancer, and for current pipe smokers the risk was 51 percent higher, compared with never-smokers.
The results were limited, however, by the relatively small numbers of cigar and pipe smokers in the sample, the authors noted.
Another limitation was that survey questions about tobacco use changed over time and didn’t determine how often nondaily smokers might have used cigarettes, cigars or pipes.
Even so, the results suggest that doctors may need to broaden how they discuss smoking with patients to make sure people understand they’re at risk even when they don’t have a daily habit, said Dr. Michael Ong of the University of California-Los Angeles and VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare
System.
“Patients often do not associate occasional use of cigar or pipes with health risks, but this study shows that current, particularly daily, cigar use is associated with increased overall risk of death,” Ong, who wasn’t involved in the study, said by email.
Doctors also need to broaden their message about smoking and cigarettes to include other tobacco products that are becoming more popular, said Judith Prochaska, a researcher at Stanford University in California who wasn’t involved in the study.
Traditionally, doctors have asked just whether people smoked cigarettes, but they should instead be questioning patients more broadly about tobacco use, Prochaska said by email.
“The tobacco landscape has been changing dramatically,” Prochaska added. “While cigarettes remain the primary tobacco product used, cigars, smokeless tobacco, e-cigarettes, hookah, and even pipe tobacco have seen gains in use, while cigarette use in the U.S. has been declining.”
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A European space probe has swung into position around Mars in preparation to analyze its atmosphere for possible signs of life.
The European Space Agency said Wednesday its Trace Gas Orbiter successfully performed a delicate maneuver known as aerobraking that involved dipping into the red planet’s upper atmosphere to slow the probe.
The agency says the orbiter will start looking for trace gases such as methane, which can result from biological or geological activity, in April. It will also search for ice that could help future Mars landings.
A NASA-made radio on board will also help relay signals from U.S. rovers on the surface back to Earth.
Europe plans to land its own rover on Mars in 2021. A European test lander crashed on the surface of Mars in 2016.
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A federal advisory panel is recommending a new vaccine against hepatitis B.
The vaccine called Heplisav-B was licensed in November and is the first new hepatitis B vaccine in 25 years.
Hepatitis B vaccines have been in childhood shots for decades. The new vaccine is for adults.
The hepatitis B virus can damage the liver and is spread through contact with blood or other bodily fluids. Cases have been rising, a trend linked to the heroin and opioid epidemic. Meanwhile, researchers found older vaccines falter in diabetics and older adults.
The new vaccine uses an additive that boosts the body’s immune response. It is two shots given over one month.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices endorsed the vaccine Wednesday in Atlanta. The government usually adopts its recommendations.
Vice President Mike Pence has brought a newly revived advisory group to Florida’s Kennedy Space Center for a rundown on how best to get Americans back to the moon, a half-century after NASA’s Apollo heydays.
Pence convened the meeting Wednesday morning inside the building where NASA once prepped pieces of the International Space Station.
This is the second meeting of the National Space Council. Pence, its chairman, named a group of candidates to advise the council that includes Buzz Aldrin and other former astronauts and aerospace industry leaders.
Wednesday’s meeting focuses on the Trump administration’s plan to return astronauts to the moon and get them to Mars and “worlds beyond.”
Pence toured Kennedy last summer just as the space council was being re-established after two decades.
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A group of scientists aboard a research vessel at the “bottom of the world” are examining the effects of climate change in Antarctica. The nonprofit, environmental watchdog group Greenpeace sent the team to gather data to help build international support for declaring a part of the continent a sanctuary from industrial fishing. Arash Arabasadi reports.
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Yasmira Castano felt she had a fresh chance at life when she received a kidney transplant almost two decades ago. The young Venezuelan was able to finish high school and went on to work as a manicurist.
But late last year, Castano, now 40, was unable to find the drugs needed to keep her body from rejecting the organ, as Venezuela’s health care system slid deeper into crisis following years of economic turmoil.
On Christmas Eve, weak and frail, Castano was rushed to a crumbling state hospital in Venezuela’s teeming capital, Caracas. Her immune system had attacked the foreign organ and she lost her kidney shortly afterward.
Now, Castano needs dialysis three times a week to filter her blood. But the hospital attached to Venezuela’s Central University, once one of South America’s top institutions, frequently suffers water outages and lacks materials for dialysis.
“I spend nights not sleeping, just worrying,” said Castano, who weighs around 77 pounds (35 kg), as she lay on an old bed in a bleak hospital room, its bare walls unadorned by a television or pictures.
Her roommate Lismar Castellanos, who just turned 21, put it more bluntly.
“Unfortunately, I could die,” said Castellanos, who lost her transplanted kidney last year and is struggling to get the dialysis she needs to keep her body functioning.
The women are among Venezuela’s roughly 3,500 transplant recipients. After years leading normal lives, they now live in fear as Venezuela’s economic collapse under President Nicolas Maduro has left the once-prosperous OPEC nation unable to purchase sufficient foreign medicine or produce enough of its own.
Some 31 Venezuelans have seen their bodies start to reject their transplanted organs in the last month due to lack of medicine, according to umbrella health group Codevida, a nongovernmental organization.
At least seven have died due to complications stemming from organ failure in the last three months.
A further 16,000 Venezuelans, many hoping for an elusive transplant, are dependent on dialysis to clean their blood — but here, too, resources and materials are sorely lacking.
Nearly half of the country’s dialysis units are out of service, according to opposition lawmaker and oncologist Jose Manuel Olivares, a leading voice on the health crisis who has toured dialysis centers to assess the scale of the problem.
‘Straight to the cemetery’
In the last three weeks alone, seven people have died due to lack of dialysis, according to Codevida, which staged a protest to decry the critical drug shortages.
Once-controlled diseases like diphtheria and measles have returned, due partly to insufficient vaccines and antibiotics, while Venezuelans suffering chronic illnesses like cancer or diabetes often have to forgo treatment.
Hundreds of thousands of desperate Venezuelans, meanwhile, have fled the country over the past year, including many medical professionals.
Amid a lack of basics like catheters and crumbling hospital infrastructure, doctors who remain struggle to cope with ever scarcer resources.
“It’s incredibly stressful. We request supplies; they don’t arrive. We call again and they still don’t arrive. Then we realize it’s because there aren’t any,” said a kidney specialist at a public hospital, asking to remain anonymous because health workers are not allowed to speak publicly about the situation.
Venezuela’s Social Security Institute, tasked with providing patients with drugs for chronic conditions, did not respond to a request for comment.
Terrified transplant patients are indebting themselves to buy pricey medicine on the black market, begging relatives abroad to funnel drugs into the country or dangerously reducing their daily intake of pills to stretch out stock.
Larry Zambrano, a 45-year-old father of two with a kidney transplant, resorted to taking immunosuppressants designed for animals last year.
Guillermo Habanero and his brother Emerson both underwent kidney transplants after suffering polycystic kidney disease.
Emerson, a healthy 53-year-old former police officer, died in November after a month without immunosuppressants.
“If you lose your kidney, you go to dialysis but there are no materials. So you go straight to the cemetery,” said Habanero, 56, who runs a small computer repair shop in the poor hillside neighborhood of Catia.
Blaming Maduro, who blames sanctions
A Reuters reporter went to the Health Ministry to request an interview, but was asked at the entrance to give her contact details instead. No one called or emailed.
Reuters was also unable to contact the Health Ministry unit in charge of transplants, Fundavene, for comment. Its website was unavailable. Multiple calls to different phone numbers went unanswered. An email bounced back and no one answered a message on the unit’s Facebook page.
Maduro’s government has said the real culprit is an alleged U.S.-led business elite seeking to sabotage its socialist agenda by hoarding medicine and imposing sanctions.
“I see the cynicism of the right-wing, worried about people who cannot get dialysis treatment, but it’s their fault: They’ve asked for sanctions and a blockade against Venezuela,” Socialist Party heavyweight Diosdado Cabello said in recent comments on his weekly television program.
Health activists blame what they see as Maduro’s inefficient and corrupt government for the medical crisis and contend that government announcements of more imports for dialysis are totally insufficient.
Despite his unpopularity, Maduro is expected to win a new six-year term in an April 22 presidential election. The opposition is likely to boycott the vote, which it has already denounced as rigged in favor of the government.
Maduro has refused to accept food and medicine donations, despite the deepening health care crisis. Health activists and doctors smuggle in medicines, often donated by the growing Venezuelan diaspora, in their suitcases, but it is far from enough.
In the decaying hospital and dialysis center visited by Reuters, patients clamored for humanitarian aid.
Dolled up for her birthday and surrounded by cakes, the 21-year-old Castellanos took selfies with her friends and spoke excitedly about one day returning to dance, one of her passions.
But fears for her future permeated the room. A hospital worker stopped by to wish Castellanos many more birthday celebrations, but her worried face betrayed doubts.
“Other countries need to help us,” Castellanos said.
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Sea levels will rise between 0.7 and 1.2 meters (27-47 inches) in the next two centuries even if governments end the fossil fuel era as promised under the Paris climate agreement, scientists said Tuesday.
Early action to cut greenhouse gas emissions would limit the long-term rise, driven by a thaw of ice from Greenland to Antarctica that will re-draw global coastlines, a German-led team wrote in the journal Nature Communications.
Sea-level rise is a threat to cities from Shanghai to London, to low-lying swaths of Florida or Bangladesh, and to entire nations such as the Maldives in the Indian Ocean or Kiribati in the Pacific.
By 2300, the report projected that sea levels would gain by 0.7-1.2 meters, even if almost 200 nations fully meet goals under the 2015 Paris Agreement, which include cutting greenhouse gas emissions to net zero in the second half of this century.
Ocean levels will rise inexorably because heat-trapping industrial gases already emitted will linger in the atmosphere, melting more ice, it said. In addition, water naturally expands as it warms above four degrees Celsius (39.2°F).
The report also found that every five years of delay beyond 2020 in peaking global emissions would mean an extra 20 centimeters (8 inches) of sea-level rise by 2300.
“Sea level is often communicated as a really slow process that you can’t do much about … but the next 30 years really matter,” lead author Matthias Mengel, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told Reuters.
Governments are not on track to meet the Paris pledges.
Global emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas emitted by burning fossil fuels, rose last year after a three-year plateau.
And U.S. President Donald Trump, who doubts that human activities are the prime cause of warming, plans to quit the Paris deal and instead promote U.S. coal, oil and natural gas.
‘Brink of inundation’
Maldives Environment Minister Thoriq Ibrahim, who chairs the 44-member Alliance of Small Island States, said Tuesday’s findings showed a need for faster action to cut emissions, especially by rich nations.
“Unfortunately, the study confirms what small island nations have been saying for years: Decades of procrastination on climate change have brought many of us to the brink of inundation,” he told Reuters.
Professor John Church, of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales, who was not involved in the study, said 100 million people now live within one meter of the high tide mark.
“More people are moving to live within the coastal zone, increasing the vulnerable population and infrastructure,” he said in a statement. “Adaptation to sea-level rise will be essential.”
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More than 100,000 malaria cases went untreated when Liberia’s health care system buckled under the 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak, according to a new study.
The research, published in the journal PLOS Medicine, shows how the toll of the Ebola outbreak goes beyond the 11,000 killed in West Africa by the virus itself. Basic health care took a major hit as well.
Ebola kills about half of the people it infects. It causes flu-like symptoms, followed by vomiting and diarrhea, and can lead to internal and external hemorrhaging. The disease spreads through contact with an infected person’s bodily fluids.
The countries of West Africa were ill-equipped to deal with the 2014-15 outbreak. Many clinics lacked the most basic tools for dealing with the disease, including latex gloves and face masks.
“Rightfully so, people were afraid to go to the clinic because they might get Ebola when they’re at the clinic,” said study lead author Brad Wagenaar at the University of Washington.
Wagenaar and colleagues found that by four months into the epidemic, clinics were delivering one-third to two-thirds fewer basic services, which he described as a “huge, dramatic decrease.”
‘Huge, dramatic decrease’
The researchers studied monthly data on health visits from 379 clinics outside the capital, Monrovia, from 2010 through 2016.
They found measles vaccinations dropped by 67 percent. Anti-malarial treatment fell by 61 percent. Thirty-five percent fewer pregnant women came in for their first pre-natal visits.
It took more than a year-and-a-half for all services to return to pre-outbreak levels.
Lost opportunities
In that time, more than three-quarters of a million clinic visits were lost, the researchers estimate, based on extrapolations from pre-outbreak trends.
That includes more than 5,000 births at health care facilities, in a country with one of the world’s highest rates of maternal death, along with a loss of 100, 000 malaria treatments. These figures, Wagenaar adds, suggest a loss of other services that may have a long-term impact, such as distributing bed nets and spraying houses with insecticides.
“Some of these other things didn’t happen during the Ebola outbreak because the health system and other partners were busy with other issues,” he said. “And now, the cases have been increasing.”
Malaria cases were 50 percent higher in December of 2017 than they were before the Ebola epidemic.
Wagenaar says the research highlights how more attention must be devoted to maintaining basic services during a health emergency. The data his group analyzed could be used in other outbreaks to prioritize services that have been overlooked.
Funding for public health systems
And after the emergency, funding should focus on strengthening public health systems.
“We know that this epidemic happened in Liberia due to multiple factors, but one being the public sector ministry of health system has been underfunded,” he said, adding that remains the case.
Donors earmarked funds for strengthening the health system, he said. But, “that money never really materialized,” he added.
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A precision nutrition approach to weight loss didn’t hold up in a study testing low fat versus low carb depending on dieters’ DNA profiles.
Previous research has suggested that a person’s insulin levels or certain genes could interact with different types of diets to influence weight loss.
Stanford University researchers examined this idea with 600 overweight adults who underwent genetic and insulin testing before being randomly assigned to reduce fat or carbohydrate intake.
Gene analyses identified variations linked with how the body processes fats or carbohydrates, which the researchers thought would make them more likely to lose weight on a low-fat or low-carb diet.
But weight loss averaged about 13 pounds over a year, regardless of genes, insulin levels or diet type. Also, some people lost as much as 60 pounds and others gained 15 pounds – more evidence that genetic characteristics and diet type appeared to make no difference.
What seemed to make a difference was healthful eating. Participants on both diets who consumed the fewest processed foods, sugary drinks, unhealthy fats and ate the most vegetables lost the most weight.
The results suggest that “precision medicine is not as important as eating mindfully, getting rid of packaged, processed food” and avoiding unhealthy habits like eating while watching television, said lead author Christopher Gardner.
The study was published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Participants had 22 health education classes during the study and were encouraged to be physically active, but the focus was on what they ate. They were advised to choose high-quality foods but were not given suggested calorie limits nor were they provided with specific foods. Results are based on what they reported eating.
During the first two months, dieters in each group were told to limit carbohydrates or fats to 20 grams daily, about the amount that’s in 1 1/2 slices of whole wheat bread and a handful of nuts respectively. They were allowed to increase that to more manageable levels during the rest of the study.
Fat intake in the low-fat group averaged 57 grams during the study versus 87 grams beforehand; carb intake in the low-carb group averaged 132 grams versus 247 grams previously. Both groups reduced their daily calorie intake by an average of about 500 calories.
The study was well-conducted but because participants were not provided with specific foods and self-reported their food choices, it wasn’t rigorous enough to disprove the idea that certain genes and insulin levels may affect which types of diets lead to weight loss, said Dr. David Ludwig, a Boston Children’s Hospital obesity researcher.
Dr. Frank Hu, nutrition chief at Harvard’s School of Public Health, has called precision nutrition a promising approach and said the study wasn’t a comprehensive test of all gene variations that might affect individual responses to weight loss diets.
“In any weight loss diets, adherence to the diet and the overall quality of the diet are probably more important than any other factors,” Hu said.
The United Nations children’s agency has declared Pakistan as the riskiest country for newborns, saying that out of every 1,000 babies born in Pakistan, 46 die before the end of their first month.
UNICEF released the findings Tuesday as part of its global awareness campaign to demand and deliver solutions on behalf of the world’s newborns.
Pregnant women are much less likely to receive assistance during delivery in Pakistan, where 14 skilled health professionals are available for every 10,000 people, according to the report.
It acknowledged the percentage of mothers who give birth in a health facility in Pakistan increased from 21 percent to 48 percent between 2001 and 2013. It also noted the proportion of women giving birth with a skilled attendant during the same period more than doubled from 23 percent to 55 percent.
“But despite these remarkable increases, largely the result of rapid urbanization and the proliferation of private sector providers not subject to satisfactory oversight, Pakistan’s very high newborn mortality rate fell by less than one quarter, from 60 in 2000 to 46 in 2016,” according to UNICEF’s findings.
Critics have long called for increasing the health budget in Pakistan, which spends less than one percent of its GDP on health services, as opposed to the World Health Organization benchmark of at least six percent of the GDP to ensure basic and life saving services.
Other countries
After Pakistan, the Central African Republic and war-shattered Afghanistan are the next most dangerous countries for newborns, according to UNICEF. Poverty, conflict and weak institutions in these countries are cited as primary reasons for the alarming number of newborn deaths.
Millions of young lives could be saved every year, the report noted, if mothers and babies had access to affordable, quality health care, good nutrition and clean water.
More than 80 percent of newborn deaths, the report said, are the result of premature birth, complications during labor and delivery, and infections such as sepsis, meningitis and pneumonia.
“But far too often, even these basics are out of reach of the mothers and babies who need them most.”
Items discovered underwater caverns in eastern Mexico to reveal what is believed to be the biggest flooded cave on the planet
Archaeologists exploring the world’s biggest flooded cave in Mexico have discovered ancient human remains at least 9,000 years old and the bones of animals who roamed the Earth during the last Ice Age.
A group of divers recently connected two underwater caverns in eastern Mexico to reveal what is believed to be the biggest flooded cave on the planet, a discovery that could help shed new light on the ancient Maya civilization.
The Yucatan peninsula is studded with monumental relics of the Maya people, whose cities drew upon an extensive network of sinkholes linked to subterranean waters known as cenotes.
Researchers say they found 248 cenotes at the 347-km (216-mile) cave system known as Sac Actun, near the beach resort of Tulum. Of the 200 archaeological sites they have discovered there, around 140 are Mayan.
Some cenotes acquired particular religious significance to the Maya, whose descendants continue to inhabit the region.
Apart from human remains, they also found bones of giant sloths, ancient elephants and extinct bears from the Pleistocene period, Mexico’s Culture Ministry said in a statement.
The cave’s discovery has rocked the archaeological world.
“I think it’s overwhelming. Without a doubt it’s the most important underwater archaeological site in the world,” said Guillermo de Anda, researcher at Mexico’s National Anthropology and History Institute (INAH).
De Anda is also director of the Gran Acuifero Maya (GAM), a project dedicated to the study and preservation of the subterranean waters of the Yucatan peninsula.
According to the INAH, water levels rose 100 meters at the end of the Ice Age, flooding the cave system and leading to “ideal conditions for the preservation of the remains of extinct megafauna from the Pleistocene.”
The Pleistocene geological epoch, the most recent Ice Age, began 2.6 million years ago and ended around 11,700 years ago.
Pollution is threatening the recently mapped Sac Actun cave system in the Yucatan Peninsula, a vast underground network that experts in Mexico say could be the most important underwater archaeological site in the world.
Subaquatic archaeologist Guillermo de Anda said the cave system’s historical span is likely unrivaled. Some of the oldest human remains on the continent have been found there, dating back more than 12,000 years, and now-extinct animal remains push the horizon back to 15,000 years.
He said researchers found a human skull that was already covered in rainwater limestone deposits long before the cave system flooded around 9,000 years ago.
De Anda said over 120 sites with Maya-era pottery and bones in the caves suggest water levels may have briefly dropped in the 216-mile (347-kilometer) -long system during a drought about 1,000 A.D. And some artifacts have been found dating to the 1847-1901 Maya uprising known as the War of the Castes.
Humans there probably didn’t live in the caves, de Anda said, but rather went down to them “during periods of great climate stress, to look for water.”
Sac Actun is “probably the most important underwater archaeological site in the world,” he said.
But de Anda said pollution and development may threaten the caves’ crystalline water.
Some of the sinkhole lakes that today serve as entrances to the cave system are used by tourists to snorkel and swim. And the main highway in the Caribbean coast state of Quintana Roo runs right over some parts of cave network. That roadway has been known to collapse into sinkholes.
Also, the cave with the stone-encased skull has high acidity levels, suggesting acidic runoff from a nearby open-air dump could damage skeletal remains.
The world’s other great underwater site, the sunken Egyptian city of Alexandria, is also threatened by pollution.
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More babies are dying each year in West and Central Africa even as child health improves overall, aid agencies said on Tuesday, calling the region’s newborn death rate a “hidden tragedy.”
Five of the 10 most dangerous countries to be born are in West and Central Africa, with infants there 50 times more likely to die within a month than if they were born in Japan or Iceland, the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF said in a report.
One in 16 pregnancies in the region results in stillbirth or death within a month — mostly preventable deaths caused by premature birth, labor complications or infection, UNICEF said.
“Neonatal health hasn’t really been addressed by governments or institutions,” UNICEF’s regional health specialist, Alain Prual, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
While the infant mortality rate is slowly declining, population growth means that the number of deaths is still increasing in West and Central Africa, Prual said.
For years aid agencies have focused on reducing deaths of children under five, which have dropped sharply, said Laurent Hiffler of medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF).
Yet babies are still dying at high rates in the first month after they are born, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“Neonatal mortality reveals the weaknesses in the system,” said Hiffler, adding that it is difficult to address because it requires continuous care throughout pregnancy and birth. “It’s been a neglected tragedy … a hidden tragedy.”
Only one in two women in the region gives birth in a health facility, often because clinics are few and far between and they cannot afford to travel, according to UNICEF.
Even when women can access a health center, staff are often poorly trained and ill-equipped, added Hiffler.
MSF teaches women simple birth techniques that can be carried out at home, such as basic resuscitation skills and using skin-to-skin contact to warm up premature babies, he said.
While the number of deaths among children under the age of five globally has more than halved in the last 25 years, progress in ending deaths of children less than one month old has been much slower, said Henrietta Fore, the new UNICEF chief.
“Given that the majority of these deaths are preventable, clearly, we are failing the world’s poorest babies,” she said.
Babies born in Japan, Iceland and Singapore have the best odds of survival globally, while newborns in Pakistan, Central African Republic and Afghanistan are the worst off, UNICEF said.
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An African charity that improved access to drinking water and sanitation and reduced the chance of cholera deaths in a village in Togo was on Monday awarded the Kyoto World Water Grand Prize.
The award is granted every three years for outstanding grassroots projects to solve water issues in developing nations.
Judges said the project by the Christian Charity for People in Distress (CCPD), which helped 290 villagers, had cut the risk of disease and death in a community prone to cholera outbreaks.
“The organization provided a serious and coherent project, with proper monitoring, and demonstrated above all an excellent efficiency,” said Jean Lapègue, a board member of the World Water Council, which adjudicates the award.
Judges also praised the project’s use of ecological toilets as an alternative to pit latrines, Lapègue told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by email.
More than 60 percent of Togo’s population lives below the poverty line, and many people lack reliable access to drinking water, education, health and electricity, according to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
In addition, the UNDP said Togo’s natural resources are becoming increasingly scarce, particularly clean water.
The CCPD will receive the award and the 2 million Japanese yen prize ($19,000) at a ceremony next month in the Brazilian capital Brasilia during the eighth World Water Forum.
Lapègue said the prize should help CCPD to extend its project in rural areas of Togo — a former French colony of 8 million people in West Africa — and would help connect the charity to other actors in the water and sanitation sector.
The award is co-organized by the Japan Water Forum and the World Water Council. CCPD is the second African charity to win — Uganda’s Katosi Women Development Trust won in 2012.
If you want to know how vampire bats can survive on a diet that — as everyone knows — consists exclusively of blood, the answer is simple. It’s in their genes.
Scientists on Monday said they have mapped for the first time the complete genome of a vampire bat, finding that this flying mammal boasts numerous genetic traits that help it thrive on an exotic food source that offers nutritional disadvantages and exposes it to blood-borne pathogens.
The researchers compared the genome of the common vampire bat, scientific name Desmodus rotundus, to genomes of bat species that eat nectar, fruit, insects and meat. They also examined microbial DNA from its droppings.
This bat and the world’s two other vampire bat species, the hairy-legged vampire bat and the white-winged vampire bat, are the only mammals that eat just blood.
The common vampire bat, a nocturnal cave-dweller with a 7-inch (18-cm) wingspan, inhabits parts of Mexico, Central America and South America. It feeds on the blood of livestock such as cattle and horses. It lands near prey under cover of darkness, walks on the ground, then feeds on the sleeping animal using razor-sharp teeth to pierce the skin and a lengthy tongue to lap up flowing blood.
“We decided to study this species because it has an ‘extreme’ diet, in the sense that it requires many adaptations in the organism to live on that,” said study lead author Lisandra Zepeda, a University of Copenhagen doctoral student while doing the research published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. “Blood is a challenging dietary source since it provides very low levels of vitamins and carbs, and a lot of proteins, salts and waste products.”
They pinpointed genome elements that augment the bat’s immune response and viral defense to cope with pathogens lurking in blood. They also identified genes involved in the metabolism of vitamins and fats that could help the bat deal with the unique nutritional aspects of its blood diet.
To some people, vampire bats are creatures of dread, associated with fictional vampires like Dracula.
“Yeah, they’re messed-up creatures, or amazing creatures, whatever you want to call them,” Zepeda said. “My personal feelings about them is that it’s too bad people demonize them like that. We should be amazed by them, not scared. They’re actually quite cute: abstract beauty. Sure, you don’t want them to bite your cows if you’re a farmer, but they were there way before you.”
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