Passenger pigeons were once so plentiful they could darken the daytime sky when they flew over North America, but oddly, their abundance may have played a role in their extinction, researchers said Thursday.

Though it may seem counter-intuitive, the pigeons (Ectopistes migratorius), evolved quickly and in the process, lost certain traits that might have been useful for surviving in smaller groups, said the study in the journal Science.

The findings have implications for other creatures threatened by swift changes in the world around them.

“Our results suggest that even species with large and stable population sizes can be at risk of extinction after a sudden environmental change,” said the study led by Beth Shapiro, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Numbering three to five billion before they began to decline in the 1800s due to a surge in hunting, these social birds were once “the most abundant bird in North America, and possibly the world,” said the report.

And although large populations of animals tend to be genetically quite diverse, researchers were stunned by their analysis of four extinct pigeon genomes, which were compared to two modern carrier pigeons.

They found that passenger pigeon diversity was “surprisingly low,” said the study.

Researchers also found areas of very high diversity in the genomes, which told researchers the birds had been around for 20,000 years or more — another surprise.

The last passenger pigeon died in a U.S. zoo in 1914.

Until now, the prevailing theory was the birds went extinct due to a booming commercial hunting industry that forced their populations to become demographically isolated, leading to lots of inbreeding, lower genetic diversity and weaker health.

But the latest findings suggest the reason was more complex. The birds evolved quickly and may have adapted to large social groups, hunting and breeding together.

Flying in gargantuan masses, their sheer size protected them against predators.

But in smaller groups, the theory goes, these defenses fell short, leading the birds’ relatively quick die-off in the matter of a few decades.

“Passenger pigeons may have evolved traits that were adaptive when their population was large but that made it more difficult for them to survive after their population was diminished by the commercial harvest,” said the report.
…

Battle lines are being drawn as the first gene therapy for an inherited condition nears the U.S. market, offering hope for people with a rare form of blindness and creating a cost dilemma for health care providers.

Spark Therapeutics, whose Luxturna treatment has been recommended for U.S. approval, told investors last week there was a case for valuing it at more than $1 million per patient, although it has yet to set an actual price.

However, the U.S. Institute for Clinical and Economic Review (ICER) said this week “at a placeholder price of $1,000,000, the high cost makes this unlikely to be a cost-effective intervention at commonly used cost-effectiveness thresholds.”

The ICER analysis did concede Luxturna was likely to be more cost-effective for younger patients.

The expected U.S. approval of Luxturna by Jan. 12 is seen as kick-starting the sector, following disappointing sales of the first two gene therapies in Europe.

More treatments based on fixing faulty genes using viruses to carry DNA into cells are coming from companies like Bluebird Bio, BioMarin and Sangamo.

Spark’s Chief Financial Officer Stephen Webster said Thursday that gene therapy was upending conventional thinking by offering a one-time cure, rather than years of repeat prescriptions, but health systems were struggling to keep pace.

“Gene therapy creates an unusual conundrum because we are fitting a round peg in a square hole … it’s tough,” he told a Jefferies health care conference in London.

Spark would like to say “if it works, pay us, and if it stops working, stop paying us,” Webster told the meeting.

But for Luxturna, which cost some $400 million to develop, such an offer was impractical, given the mechanics of the U.S. system and a reluctance by big health plans to move away from upfront payments for rare disease drugs.

Longer-term, pay-for-performance models could be adopted for hemophilia, where the benefits of one-time treatment can be weighed against the huge cost of regular infusions of blood-clotting factors, Webster said.

A one-off treatment would slash the need for such expensive care. But there are also indirect costs and quality of life benefits — especially in a condition like blindness — that manufacturers argue should be recognized.

Nightstar Therapeutics CEO David Fellows, whose company is also developing gene therapies for eye disorders, said calculating gene therapy’s true value was not easy.

“Trying to capture all this into some sort of price algorithm is very challenging. But we are trying to quantify the emotional impact, the care-giver impact, the effect on careers and so on,” he told the conference.
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2018 marks the 100th anniversary of the deadliest flu pandemic in recorded history. More people died in the 1918 flu pandemic than in World War I. Despite medical breakthroughs in controlling many diseases, influenza is one that remains elusive. VOA medical correspondent Carol Pearson reports.
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It is difficult to overstate the potential that gene editing holds for the future of medicine. An attempt to explore its potential was undertaken in California this week when a man suffering from a rare genetic disease received an infusion of gene-altering tools that could lead to a cure. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
…

Pope Francis condemned on Thursday inequality in healthcare, particularly in rich countries, saying governments had a duty to protect all citizens.

“Increasingly sophisticated and costly treatments are available to ever more limited and privileged segments of the population,” Francis said in an address to a conference of European members of the World Medical Association.

“This raises questions about the sustainability of healthcare delivery and about what might be called a systemic tendency toward growing inequality in healthcare,” he said.

The tendency was clearly apparent when you compared healthcare cover between countries and continents, the pope said, adding that it was also visible within more wealthy countries, “where access to healthcare risks being more dependent on individuals’ economic resources than on their actual need for treatment.”

Francis did not mention any countries. Healthcare is a big issue in the United States, where President Donald Trump has vowed to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, introduced by his predecessor, Barack Obama, which aimed to make it easier for lower-income households to get health insurance.

The pope said “the state cannot renounce its duty to protect all those involved, defending the fundamental equality whereby everyone is recognized under law as a human being living with others in society.”

He said healthcare legislation needed a “broad vision and a comprehensive view of what most effectively promotes the common good in each concrete situation.”
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Soldiers in Myanmar have gang raped Rohingya women in continued violence against the Muslim minority in Rakhine state, according to a Human Rights Watch report.

Human Rights Watch cited first-hand interviews with 52 Rohingya women and girls who fled to Bangladesh and reported being raped by security forces in Myanmar, also known as Burma.

“Rape has been a prominent and devastating feature of the Burmese military’s campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya,” said Skye Wheeler, women’s rights emergencies researcher at Human Rights Watch and author of the report. “The Burmese military’s barbaric acts of violence have left countless women and girls brutally harmed and traumatized.”

All but one of the interviewees was gang raped, HRW said.

 

WATCH: HRW Report: Myanmar Security Forces Using Sexual Violence as Scare Tactic

Hundreds of cases

HRW also spoke with multiple humanitarian organizations in Bangladesh who have reported “hundreds” of rape cases. Numbers of rape victims are likely much higher, as social stigma keeps many women silent.

“I have had to deal with disgust, others looking away from me,” Isharahat Islam, who was raped by soldiers in her village Hathi Para in October 2016, told HRW.

The numbers also cannot account for those who were killed after they were raped.

Fifteen-year-old Hala Sadak from a village in the Maungdaw Township told HRW that soldiers had dragged her from her home, stripped her naked, and pushed her against a tree where she estimates as many as 10 men raped her from behind.

“They left me where I was … when my brother and sister came to get me, I was lying there on the ground, they thought I was dead,” she said.

Emotional, physical injuries

In addition to depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, women reported untreated injuries including vaginal tears, bleeding, and infections, the report said.

More than 600,000 Rohingya Muslims have left Myanmar’s Rakhine State since Aug. 25, after insurgents attacked security forces and prompted a brutal military crackdown that has been described as ethnic cleansing.

Myanmar’s government has repeatedly rejected claims that atrocities, including rape and extrajudicial killings, are occurring in northern Rakhine, the epicenter of the violence that the United Nations has called “textbook ethnic cleansing.”

Denials from Myanmar

In September, the Rakhine state border security minister denied reports of rape by security forces in the state, according to HRW.

“Where is the proof? Look at those women who are making these claims — would anyone want to rape them?” he was quoted as saying in Thursday’s report.

Myanmar does not recognize the Rohingya and denies them citizenship, referring to them as “Bengali” to imply origins in Bangladesh.

Though Aung San Suu Kyi has been criticized for sidestepping allegations of abuses, many Western governments have been reluctant to ostracize her during a fragile transition to democracy.
…

Giant rats are probably not the first thing that come to mind to tackle tuberculosis but scientists hope their sniffing skills will speed up efforts to detect the deadly disease in major cities across the world.

Tuberculosis, which is curable and preventable, is one of the world’s deadliest infectious diseases, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), killing 1.7 million people in 2016 and infecting 10.4 million others.

African Giant Pouched Rats, trained by Belgian charity APOPO, are known for sniffing out landmines in countries from Angola to Cambodia and for detecting TB cases in East Africa.

Over the next few years, APOPO plans to fight tuberculosis at the source by launching TB-detection rat facilities in major cities of 30 high-risk countries including Vietnam, India and Nigeria.

“One of the best ways to fight TB at source is in major cities that draw a lot of people from the rural areas,” James Pursey, APOPO spokesman, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“It is a vicious circle. You can be reinfected. To fight TB, you have to hit it hard,” he said by phone from Zimbabwe.

Many people get infected in big, densely populated cities and spread the disease to rural areas, according to Pursey.

The rats learn to recognize the presence of TB in samples of mucus that is coughed up from the patient’s lower airways.

In Tanzania, people in communities where TB is most common, including in prisons, often fail to show up for screening because of a lack of money or awareness, placing a huge burden on health authorities, health experts said.

“TB is a disease of poverty,” said Pursey. “If nothing changes it can only get worse.”

The APOPO has seen the TB detection rate increase by 40 percent in clinics it has worked with in Tanzania and Mozambique, according to Pursey, who said that using rats to screen did not negate the need for proper diagnostic testing.

While a technician may take four days to detect a case of TB, a trained rat can screen 100 samples in 20 minutes, and a rat screening costs as little as 20 US cents, APOPO said.
…

Climate change threats, from worsening drought and flooding to sea level rise, could increase the risks of hunger and child malnutrition around the world by 20 percent by 2050, food security researchers warned Wednesday.

But looking carefully at the very different risks facing each country, region and type of food producer — from highland rice farmers in Cambodia to cattle herders in South Sudan — could help reduce that threat of growing hunger, they said.

In North Africa, for instance, both herders and farmers face fast-growing risks from more frequent, longer and more intense heatwaves and declining water availability, while population growth and greater urbanization could also hit food security, according to a report by the World Food Program (WFP) released Wednesday at the U.N. climate talks in Bonn.

In South Asia, by comparison, dense populations of farmers face threats from worsening floods, cyclones and droughts, as well as long-term threats to the stability of monsoons and water flow in glacier-fed rivers.

“Different groups are affected by different types of risks, at different intensities and at different times,” said Gernot Laganda, the director of climate and disaster risk reduction programs at WFP.

Building greater resilience to the threats will require “layers” of responses, he said.

Catastrophic threats of large-scale losses of crops or animals — the type that might come along every 5 to 10 years, for instance, and force those hit to migrate — might be dealt with in part with insurance plans, Laganda said.

But more regular seasonal threats — of smaller-scale flooding, for instance — cannot be insured, he said, as the problems come too frequently.

In those cases, building savings groups among women farmers, for instance, to ensure cash is on hand to deal with the crop failures, could be a better way to deal with risks.

The report aims to give country governments, and food security organizations, a clearer and more specific look at the threats they face, and better tools to deal with them. It looks in detail at particularly threatened regions, including parts of Africa and Asia, and at 15 specific countries, from Afghanistan to Mali.

One surprise from the work, Laganda said, is that it was not always the poorest countries that were most vulnerable to hunger threats.

“Sometimes we assume middle-income countries have a much easier time … which is not necessarily the case,” he said.

South Asia, in particular, has big numbers of hungry people, he said and overall “the largest vulnerabilities to loss and damage in food systems occur in Asia.”

In Africa, drought is the biggest threat to hunger levels, but conflicts also play a big role, he said.

Laganda said such differences need a careful look if countries and food security agencies are to better manage coming climate threats and achieve the international goal of ending hunger by 2030, one of a set of so-called Sustainable Development Goals.

“We are not going to achieve zero hunger by 2030 if we do not factor climate-related shocks and stresses into our equation,” he warned. “Climate needs to factor into food security discussions … at a country level in a much bigger form than it does now.”

And aid agencies like WFP “as much as governments” need to focus more on risk management, he said.

Mikael Eriksson, who works on climate, energy and environmental issues for Sweden’s government, said the growing complexity of humanitarian disasters requires innovation and rethinking old ways of doing things.

“Prevention is so much more efficient than disaster management,” he said.

 
…

Scientists for the first time have tried editing a gene inside the body in a bold attempt to permanently change a person’s DNA to try to cure a disease.

 

The experiment was done Monday in California on 44-year-old Brian Madeux. Through an IV, he received billions of copies of a corrective gene and a genetic tool to cut his DNA in a precise spot.

 

“It’s kind of humbling” to be the first to test this, said Madeux, who has a metabolic disease called Hunter syndrome. “I’m willing to take that risk. Hopefully it will help me and other people.”

 

Signs of whether it’s working may come in a month; tests will show for sure in three months.

 

If it’s successful, it could give a major boost to the fledgling field of gene therapy. Scientists have edited people’s genes before, altering cells in the lab that are then returned to patients. There also are gene therapies that don’t involve editing DNA.

 

But these methods can only be used for a few types of diseases. Some give results that may not last. Some others supply a new gene like a spare part, but can’t control where it inserts in the DNA, possibly causing a new problem like cancer.

 

This time, the gene tinkering is happening in a precise way inside the body. It’s like sending a mini surgeon along to place the new gene in exactly the right location.

 

“We cut your DNA, open it up, insert a gene, stitch it back up. Invisible mending,” said Dr. Sandy Macrae, president of Sangamo Therapeutics, the California company testing this for two metabolic diseases and hemophilia. “It becomes part of your DNA and is there for the rest of your life.”

 

That also means there’s no going back, no way to erase any mistakes the editing might cause.

 

“You’re really toying with Mother Nature” and the risks can’t be fully known, but the studies should move forward because these are incurable diseases, said one independent expert, Dr. Eric Topol of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in San Diego.

 

Protections are in place to help ensure safety, and animal tests were very encouraging, said Dr. Howard Kaufman, a Boston scientist on the National Institutes of Health panel that approved the studies.

 

He said gene editing’s promise is too great to ignore. “So far there’s been no evidence that this is going to be dangerous,” he said. “Now is not the time to get scared.”

 

Woe from head to toe 

Fewer than 10,000 people worldwide have these metabolic diseases, partly because many die very young. Those with Madeux’s condition, Hunter syndrome , lack a gene that makes an enzyme that breaks down certain carbohydrates. These build up in cells and cause havoc throughout the body.

 

Patients may have frequent colds and ear infections, distorted facial features, hearing loss, heart problems, breathing trouble, skin and eye problems, bone and joint flaws, bowel issues and brain and thinking problems.

 

“Many are in wheelchairs… dependent on their parents until they die,” said Dr. Chester Whitley, a University of Minnesota genetics expert who plans to enroll patients in the studies.

 

Weekly IV doses of the missing enzyme can ease some symptoms, but cost $100,000 to $400,000 a year and don’t prevent brain damage.

 

Madeux, who now lives near Phoenix, is engaged to a nurse, Marcie Humphrey, who he met 15 years ago in a study that tested this enzyme therapy at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland, where the gene editing experiment took place.

 

He has had 26 operations for hernias, bunions, bones pinching his spinal column, and ear, eye and gall bladder problems.

 

“It seems like I had a surgery every other year of my life” and many procedures in between, he said. Last year he nearly died from a bronchitis and pneumonia attack. The disease had warped his airway, and “I was drowning in my secretions, I couldn’t cough it out.”

 

Madeux has a chef’s degree and was part owner of two restaurants in Utah, cooking for U.S. ski teams and celebrities, but now can’t work in a kitchen or ride horses as he used to.

 

Gene editing won’t fix damage he’s already suffered, but he hopes it will stop the need for weekly enzyme treatments.

 

Initial studies will involve up to 30 adults to test safety, but the ultimate goal is to treat children very young, before much damage occurs.

 

How it works

 

A gene-editing tool called CRISPR has gotten a lot of recent attention, but this study used a different one called zinc finger nucleases. They’re like molecular scissors that seek and cut a specific piece of DNA.

 

The therapy has three parts: The new gene and two zinc finger proteins. DNA instructions for each part are placed in a virus that’s been altered to not cause infection but to ferry them into cells. Billions of copies of these are given through a vein.

 

They travel to the liver, where cells use the instructions to make the zinc fingers and prepare the corrective gene. The fingers cut the DNA, allowing the new gene to slip in. The new gene then directs the cell to make the enzyme the patient lacked.

 

Only 1 percent of liver cells would have to be corrected to successfully treat the disease, said Madeux’s physician and study leader, Dr. Paul Harmatz at the Oakland hospital.

 

“How bulletproof is the technology? We’re just learning,” but safety tests have been very good, said Dr. Carl June, a University of Pennsylvania scientist who has done other gene therapy work but was not involved in this study.

 

What could go wrong

 

Safety issues plagued some earlier gene therapies. One worry is that the virus might provoke an immune system attack. In 1999, 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger died in a gene therapy study from that problem, but the new studies use a different virus that’s proved much safer in other experiments.

 

Another worry is that inserting a new gene might have unforeseen effects on other genes. That happened years ago, when researchers used gene therapy to cure some cases of the immune system disorder called “bubble boy” disease. Several patients later developed leukemia because the new gene inserted into a place in the native DNA where it unintentionally activated a cancer gene.

 

“When you stick a chunk of DNA in randomly, sometimes it works well, sometimes it does nothing and sometimes it causes harm,” said Hank Greely, a Stanford University bioethicist. “The advantage with gene editing is you can put the gene in where you want it.”

 

Finally, some fear that the virus could get into other places like the heart, or eggs and sperm where it could affect future generations. Doctors say built-in genetic safeguards prevent the therapy from working anywhere but the liver, like a seed that only germinates in certain conditions.

 

This experiment is not connected to other, more controversial work being debated to try to edit genes in human embryos to prevent diseases before birth — changes that would be passed down from generation to generation.

 

Making history

 

Madeux’s treatment was to have happened a week earlier, but a small glitch prevented it.

 

He and his fiancee returned to Arizona, but nearly didn’t make it back to Oakland in time for the second attempt because their Sunday flight was canceled and no others were available until Monday, after the treatment was to take place.

 

Scrambling, they finally got a flight to Monterey, California, and a car service took them just over 100 miles north to Oakland.

 

On Monday he had the three-hour infusion, surrounded by half a dozen doctors, nurses and others wearing head-to-toe protective garb to lower the risk of giving him any germs. His doctor, Harmatz, spent the night at the hospital to help ensure his patient stayed well.

 

“I’m nervous and excited,” Madeux said as he prepared to leave the hospital. “I’ve been waiting for this my whole life, something that can potentially cure me.”
…

San Bernardino is one the poorest cities in California. A group of Muslim doctors has established Al-Shifa, a medical clinic to provide health-related services to poor residents of the city. The medical facility has been providing free of charge services to people in need for more than a decade. Mohammad Habibzada reports for VOA from San Bernardino.
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Improving soil health in farmlands could capture extra carbon equivalent to the planet-warming emissions generated by the transport sector, one of the world’s most polluting industries, experts said Tuesday.

Soil naturally absorbs carbon from the atmosphere through a process known as sequestration, which not only reduces harmful greenhouse gases but also creates more fertile soil.

Better soil management could boost carbon stored in the top layer of the soil by up to 1.85 gigatons each year, about the same as the carbon emissions of transport globally, according to a study published in the journal Nature.

“Healthier soils store more carbon and produce more food,” Louis Verchot of the Colombia-based International Center for Tropical Agriculture, and one of the study’s authors, said in a statement.

“Investing in better soil management will make our agricultural systems more productive and resilient to future shocks and stresses.”

Using compost, keeping soil disturbance to a minimum, and rotating crops to include plants such as legumes can help restore organic matter in the soil, Verchot told Reuters.

The extra carbon that could be stored from rejuvenated soil is equivalent to 3 to 7 billion tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide, he said.

“The U.S. emits around 5 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year. So [emissions] equivalent of a major economy could be sequestered in soils each year with changes in farming practices,” he added.

The study found the United States has the highest total annual potential to store carbon in the soil, followed by India, China, Russia and Australia, if soil management is improved.

Carbon sequestration could be increased intensively in parts of southern Africa, Ethiopia and Sudan too, Verchot said in a phone interview.

The Earth’s soils contain more carbon than the planet’s atmosphere and vegetation combined, but when land is overexploited or degraded, trapped carbon is released back into the atmosphere, resulting in planet-warming emissions.

About a third of the world’s soils are degraded because of soil erosion — the loss of the topsoil by wind, rain or use of machinery — and other practices, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Agriculture, forestry and changes in land use together produce 21 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, making them the second-largest emitter after the energy sector, FAO said.
…

Syria has formally joined the 2015 Paris deal aimed at slowing climate change, the United Nations said on Tuesday, leaving the United States as the only country opposed to the pact.

Syria, racked by civil war, and Nicaragua were the only two nations outside the 195-nation pact when it was agreed in 2015.

Nicaragua’s left-wing government, which originally denounced the plan as too weak, signed up last month.

Syria announced last week that it intended to join.

U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters in New York that Syria had submitted instruments of accession to the Paris climate deal and that the move would enter into force for the country on Dec. 13.

U.S. President Donald Trump, who has expressed doubts that man-made greenhouse gas emissions are the prime cause of global warming, announced in June that he intended to pull out and instead promote U.S. coal and oil industries.

Overall, the Paris agreement seeks to limit a rise in temperatures to “well below” two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, ideally 1.5.

The U.N.’s weather agency said on Monday that this year is on track to be the second or third warmest since records began in the 19th century, behind a record-breaking 2016, and about 1.1 Celsius (2F) above pre-industrial times.
…

Astronauts got a mouth-watering haul with Tuesday’s Earth-to-space delivery — pizza and ice cream.

A commercial supply ship arrived at the International Space Station two days after launching from Virginia. Besides NASA equipment and experiments, the Orbital ATK capsule holds chocolate and vanilla ice cream for the six station astronauts, as well as make-your-own flatbread pizzas.

Astronauts always crave pizza in orbit, but it’s been particularly tough for Italy’s Paolo Nespoli. He’s been up there since July and has another month to go.

Nespoli used the space station’s robot arm to grab the cargo ship, as they zoomed 260 miles above the Indian Ocean.

Besides flatbread, the capsule contains all the makings of a good Earth pizza: sauce, cheese, pepperoni, anchovy paste, tomatoes, pesto, olive oil and more.

Astronauts also get a hankering for cold treats, thus the big frozen shipment of ice cream cups, ice cream sandwiches, ice cream bars and frozen fruit bars.

In all, the capsule contains nearly 4 tons of cargo. It’s named the S.S. Gene Cernan in honor of the last man to walk on the moon, who died in January.

The experiments include mealworms and micro clover, sent up by high school students.

The supply ship will remain at the space station until the beginning of December, when it’s cut loose with a load of trash. It will hover close to the orbiting lab as part of an experiment, then several mini satellites will be released and it will burn up in the atmosphere on re-entry.

SpaceX, NASA’s other prime shipper, will make a delivery next month.
…

An increase in suicide rates among U.S. teens occurred at the same time social media use surged and a new analysis suggests there may be a link.

Suicide rates for teens rose between 2010 and 2015 after they had declined for nearly two decades, according to data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Why the rates went up isn’t known.

The study doesn’t answer the question, but it suggests that one factor could be rising social media use. Recent teen suicides have been blamed on cyberbullying, and social media posts depicting “perfect” lives may be taking a toll on teens’ mental health, researchers say.

“After hours of scrolling through Instagram feeds, I just feel worse about myself because I feel left out,” said Caitlin Hearty, a 17-year-old Littleton, Colorado, high school senior who helped organize an offline campaign last month after several local teen suicides.

“No one posts the bad things they’re going through,” said Chloe Schilling, also 17, who helped with the campaign, in which hundreds of teens agreed not to use the internet or social media for one month.

The study’s authors looked at CDC suicide reports from 2009-15 and results of two surveys given to U.S. high school students to measure attitudes, behaviors and interests. About half a million teens ages 13 to 18 were involved. They were asked about use of electronic devices, social media, print media, television and time spent with friends. Questions about mood included frequency of feeling hopeless and considering or attempting suicide.

The researchers didn’t examine circumstances surrounding individual suicides. Dr. Christine Moutier, chief medical officer at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, said the study provides weak evidence for a popular theory and that many factors influence teen suicide.

The study was published Tuesday in the journal Clinical Psychological Science.

Data highlighted in the study include:

-Teens’ use of electronic devices including smartphones for at least five hours daily more than doubled, from 8 percent in 2009 to 19 percent in 2015. These teens were 70 percent more likely to have suicidal thoughts or actions than those who reported one hour of daily use.

-In 2015, 36 percent of all teens reported feeling desperately sad or hopeless, or thinking about, planning or attempting suicide, up from 32 percent in 2009. For girls, the rates were higher – 45 percent in 2015 versus 40 percent in 2009.

-In 2009, 58% of 12th grade girls used social media every day or nearly every day; by 2015, 87% used social media every day or nearly every day. They were 14% more likely to be depressed than those who used social media less frequently.

“We need to stop thinking of smartphones as harmless,” said study author Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University who studies generational trends. “There’s a tendency to say, ‘Oh, teens are just communicating with their friends.’ Monitoring kids’ use of smartphones and social media is important, and so is setting reasonable limits, she said.

Dr. Victor Strasburger, a teen medicine specialist at the University of New Mexico, said the study only implies a connection between teen suicides, depression and social media. It shows the need for more research on new technology, Strasburger said.

He noted that skeptics who think social media is being unfairly criticized compare it with so-called vices of past generations: “When dime-store books came out, when comic books came out, when television came out, when rock and roll first started, people were saying ‘This is the end of the world.'”

With its immediacy, anonymity, and potential for bullying, social media has a unique potential for causing real harm, he said.

“Parents don’t really get that,” Strasburger said.
…

The Food and Drug Administration has approved the first drug in the United States with a digital ingestion tracking system, in an unprecedented move to ensure that patients with mental illness take the medicine prescribed for them.

 

The drug Abilify MyCite was developed by Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. The drug Abilify was first approved by the FDA in 2002 to treat schizophrenia, and the ingestible sensor, made by Proteus Digital health, was approved for marketing in 2012. The FDA said in a statement Monday that the digitally enhanced medication “works by sending a message from the pill’s sensor to a wearable patch.”

 

“Being able to track ingestion of medications prescribed for illness may be useful for some patients,” said Dr. Mitchell Mathis, director of the division of Psychiatry Products in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. “The FDA supports the development and use of new technology in prescription drugs and is committed to working with companies to understand how this technology might benefit patients and prescribers.”

 

Green-lighting the new medication, however, came with some caveats. Among them, the FDA said it was important to note that Abilify MyCite’s labeling asserts “the ability of the product to improve patient compliance with their treatment regimen has not been shown.”

 

“Abilify MyCite should not be used to track drug ingestion in ‘real-time’ or during an emergency,” the statement said, “because detection may be delayed or may not occur.”

 

In a portion of the statement that appeared to address privacy concerns, the FDA said the wearable patch that comes with the medication “transmits the information to a mobile application so that patients can track the ingestion of the medication on their smart phone. Patients can also permit their caregivers and physician to access the information through a web-based portal.”

 

In a statement issued last May at the time the FDA accepted submission of product for review, Otsuka Pharmaceutical, Ltd. of Toyko and Proteus Digital, of Redwood City, California, said that “with the patient’s consent, this information could be shared with their health care professional team and selected family and friends, with the goal of allowing physicians to be more informed in making treatment decisions that are specific to the patient’s needs.”

 

The companies said the Proteus Ingestible sensor “activates when it reaches stomach fluids and communicates with the patch.”

 

The FDA said the product is designed for the treatment of schizophrenia, acute treatment of manic and mixed episodes associated with a bipolar disorder and for use as an add-on treatment for depression in adults.”
…

The naked mole rat is a unique animal, and to most people one ugly little creature. These rodents live most of their life underground and are nearly blind. But what makes them really attractive to scientists is they are cancer free. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
…

Hundreds of volunteers are patrolling beaches on the West Coast of the United States to monitor the number of dead birds that wash ashore. The multi-state monitoring program helps tell a larger story about seabird deaths and the health of coastal environments. Faith Lapidus reports
…

The chances of a hurricane flooding parts of Texas, like Harvey did, have soared sixfold in just 25 years because of global warming and will likely triple once again before the end of the century, a new study says.

 

Study author Kerry Emanuel, a meteorology professor and hurricane expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that what was once an extremely rare event — 20 inches of rain over a large area of Texas — could soon be almost common.

 

From 1981 to 2000, the probability of 20 inches of rain happening somewhere over a large chunk of Texas was 1 in 100 or even less, Emanuel said. Now it’s 6 in 100 and by 2081, those odds will be 18 in 100, he said.

 

“The changes in probabilities are because of global warming,” Emanuel said.

 

The study was released Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

Emanuel said he hurried the study to help Houston officials think about what conditions they should consider when they rebuild.

 

Texas state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon said he was struck by the potential for much higher rainfall that Emanuel’s simulations predict for the future and how important it is for the design of critical structures like dams and nuclear facilities.

 

“If the worst-case precipitation scenario is getting worse, as Kerry’s study and other evidence implies, that safety margin is shrinking,” Nielsen-Gammon said in an email, highlighting Emanuel’s results that also show the worst-case storms becoming wetter and more common.

Gabriel Vecchi, a climate scientist at Princeton who wasn’t part of the study, said the study confirms what scientists have already thought: “that the most extreme rainfall events will become more likely as the planet warms.”

 

“These results highlight the importance of finding ways to incorporate our understanding of climate change in long-term urban planning, storm water management and in flood mapping,” Vecchi said in an email.

 

To do the study Emanuel had to use some innovative modeling techniques. Global climate models used for future warming studies aren’t detailed enough to simulate hurricanes. Hurricane models don’t say anything about the larger climate. So Emanuel combined the models and then created thousands and thousands of fictional storm “seedlings” to see what would happen.

 

Emanuel’s calculations used the 20-inch (half a meter) rainfall total because that was the initial figure discussed as the storm was dying down.

Later measurements showed that Harvey’s rain was far heavier — and far rarer — than initially reported. After Emanuel had started his work, records showed Harvey’s Houston-wide rainfall ended up closer to 33 inches (84 centimeters). And in individual areas pit peaked at 60 inches (1.5 meters).

 

Emanuel called those numbers “biblical.”

 

“By the standards of the average climate during 1981-2000, Harvey’s rainfall in Houston was `biblical’ in the sense that it likely occurred around once since the Old Testament was written,” Emanuel’s study said.

 

While several scientists praised the study’s technique, Christopher Landsea, science operations chief at the National Hurricane Center, had some reservations. He said Emanuel’s results don’t fit with other climate change model projections which do show higher rainfall totals but also show a decrease in the number of storms.
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Oenophiles take note: 5980 BC was a very good year for wine.

Scientists on Monday announced the discovery of the oldest-known evidence for winemaking, detecting telltale chemical signs of the fermented alcoholic beverage made from grapes in fragments of nearly 8,000-year-old earthenware jars at two sites about 30 miles (50 km) south of Georgia’s capital Tbilisi.

The findings show that this important cultural achievement occurred earlier than previously known in the South Caucasus region on the border of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. Until now, the oldest wine-making evidence had come from pottery from the Zagros Mountains in northwestern Iran dating to 5400-5000 BC.

“Alcohol had an important role in societies in the past just as today,” said University of Toronto archaeologist Stephen Batiuk, one of the researchers in the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Wine is central to civilization as we know it in the West,” Batiuk added. “As a medicine, social lubricant, mind-altering substance and highly valued commodity, wine became the focus of religious cults, pharmacopoeias, cuisines, economies and society in the ancient Near East.”

David Lordkipanidze, director of the Georgian National Museum who helped lead the research, said large jars called qvevri similar to the ancient ones are still used today for wine-making in Georgia.

The researchers performed biochemical analyses to find residual wine compounds the pottery had absorbed. University of Pennsylvania biomolecular archaeologist Patrick McGovern found evidence of tartaric acid, an indication of brewing involving the Eurasian grape, as well as three associated organic acids: malic, succinic and citric.

The pottery was found at two Neolithic villages, once home to perhaps 60 people each, consisting of small mudbrick houses.

The villagers harvested wheat, raised sheep, goat and cattle, and used simple tools made of bone and volcanic glass called obsidian.

The grayish jars, some decorated with simple images of grape clusters and a man dancing, were roughly 32 inches (80 cm) tall and 16 inches in (40 cm) wide. Evidence of wine was spotted in eight jars, the oldest from about 5980 BC.

“The wine was probably made similarly to the traditional qvevri method in Georgia today, where the grapes are crushed and the fruit, stems and seeds are all fermented together,” Batiuk said.

This is not the earliest sign of any alcoholic beverage.

Evidence previously was found in China of a fermented alcoholic mix of rice, honey and fruit from about 7000 BC.
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The number of people living with diabetes has tripled since 2000, pushing the global cost of the disease to $850 billion a year, medical experts said Tuesday.

The majority of those affected have type 2 diabetes, which is linked to obesity and lack of exercise, and the epidemic is spreading particularly fast in poorer countries as people adopt Western diets and urban lifestyles.

The latest estimates from the International Diabetes Federation mean that one in 11 adults worldwide have the condition, which occurs when the amount of sugar in the blood is too high.

The total number of diabetics is now 451 million and is expected to reach 693 million by 2045 if current trends continue.

The high price of dealing with the disease reflects not only the cost of medicines but also the management of a range of complications, such as limb amputations and eye problems.
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The United States is participating in the 23rd Conference of the Parties (COP-23) of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, despite President Donald Trump’s announcement it will be leaving the Paris Climate Accords.

The State Department says a U.S. delegation is participating in the conference in Bonn, Germany.

A State Department statement Monday said, “The United States remains a Party in good standing to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and is participating in ongoing negotiations under the Framework Convention as well as the Paris Agreement, in order to ensure a level playing field that benefits and protects U.S. interests.”

The president announced in June the United States will leave the Paris climate agreement, which would obligate the United States to cut its overall greenhouse gas emissions by at least 26 percent by 2025, compared with 2005 levels.

Trump, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Environmental Protection Agency head Scott Pruitt have all questioned how much human activity has contributed to climate change.
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Afghanistan and Pakistan officially are now the only two nations across the globe to have reported wild polio virus cases so far this year, though the numbers of cases have declined to historic lows.

Armed conflicts, deadly attacks on polio vaccinators and instances such as lack of administrative oversight while reaching marginalized populations and anti-vaccine propaganda by Islamists are blamed for the failure to eradicate the crippling disease from Pakistan and Afghanistan.

“As of 9 November 2017, there are 14 cases of wild polio virus globally — nine in Afghanistan and five in Pakistan — the lowest number recorded in history,” UNICEF reported Monday.

Pakistani officials reported 300 polio cases in 2014 and Afghan cases have gradually declined from 80 in 2011.

While the two countries have taken significant measures to overcome domestic challenges facing national immunization campaigns, UNICEF officials credit ongoing coordination between polio teams of Afghanistan and Pakistan for reducing cross-border transmission of the devastating disease.

A Kabul-based UNICEF spokesman, Kamal Shah, acknowledged political tensions between the two countries are not hampering counter-polio efforts. He says polio teams on both sides make sure children among thousands of daily border crossers get vaccinated.

“There is a good cooperation going on and we try our best to synchronize the dates of our [polio vaccination] campaigns. So, the efforts and the cooperation between the two countries is having a big hand in reducing the number of polio cases [on both sides],” Shah told VOA.

Divided families and more than three million Afghan refugees in Pakistan are mostly among daily crossers and serve as carriers of the virus, officials say.

Last week, Afghanistan’s ninth case of the year was confirmed in an eastern border region, with the virus linked to transmission that had occurred earlier in the year across the border in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, according to UNICEF.

Pakistan and Afghanistan share a 2,600-kilometer largely porous border. However, there are only two crossings, Torkham and Chaman, that Pakistani authorities allow for visitors to travel in either direction.

Shah says most of the recently reported polio virus cases have been transmitted through the Chaman crossing, prompting officials to focus vaccination efforts on the adjoining Afghan border town of Spin Boldak.

“[E]specially in 2017, most of the cases we have, the genetic link of the virus is linked with a polio virus in Baluchistan. That is why Spin Boldak is called the epicenter of polio in the region,” he noted.

The southwestern Pakistani border province of Baluchistan is where Chaman crossing is located.

UNICEF’s Shah explained that despite intensified hostilities in Afghanistan, anti-polio efforts are effectively bringing down the number of cases in the country because vaccinators are able to conduct campaigns even in areas controlled by the Taliban insurgency.

“In all areas, which are under the government or the areas which are under the control of anti-government elements, the polio program is implemented in those areas as well that is why we are successful to reduce the number of cases [in Afghanistan],” he noted.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
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While climate change is being discussed this week in Germany, it’s being felt by farmers and ranchers around the world. But it’s hitting subsistence farmers in places like Uganda particularly hard. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Standing in a stately Mayo Clinic library, Lilly Ross reached out and touched the face of a stranger, prodding the rosy cheeks and eyeing the hairless gap in a chin she once had known so well.

“That’s why he always grew it so long, so he could try to mesh it together on the chin,” she told Andy Sandness, as he shut his eyes and braced for the tickle of her touch on new nerve endings in the face that had been her husband’s.

Sixteen months after transplant surgery gave Sandness the face that had belonged to Calen “Rudy” Ross, he met the woman who had agreed to donate her high school sweetheart’s visage to a man who lived nearly a decade without one.

First meeting

The two came together last month in a meeting arranged by the Mayo Clinic, the same place where Sandness underwent a 56-hour surgery that was the clinic’s first such transplant. With her toddler Leonard in tow, Ross strode toward Sandness, tears welling in her eyes as they tightly embraced.

Ross had fretted before the meeting, fearful of the certain reminders of her husband, who took his own life. But her stress quickly melted away: Without Calen’s eyes, forehead or strong cheeks, Sandness didn’t look like him, she told herself.

Instead, she saw a man whose life had changed through her husband’s gift, newly confident after 10 years of hiding from mirrors and staring eyes.

“It made me proud,” Ross said of the 32-year-old Sandness. “The way Rudy saw himself … he didn’t see himself like that.”

Two men, similar tale

Sandness and Calen Ross lived lives full of hunting, fishing and exploring the outdoors before their struggles consumed them, 10 years and hundreds of miles apart.

Sandness put a rifle below his chin in late 2006 in his native Wyoming and pulled the trigger, destroying most of his face. Ross shot himself and died in southwestern Minnesota a decade later.

By then, Sandness had receded from contact with the outside world, ashamed of his injuries — surgeries to rebuild his face had left him a quarter-sized mouth, and his prosthetic nose frequently fell off.

Hope first came in 2012 when the Mayo Clinic started exploring a face transplant program and again in early 2016 when he was wait-listed for the procedure.

Ross had agreed to donate her husband’s lungs, kidneys and other organs to patients. Then LifeSource, a Midwestern nonprofit organization that facilitates organ and tissue donations, broached the idea of a donation for a man awaiting a face transplant at the clinic.

Ross and Sandness’ ages, blood type, skin color and facial structure were such a near-perfect match that Sandness’ surgeon, Dr. Samir Mardini, said the two men could have been cousins.

Ross consented, despite her hesitation about someday seeing her husband’s face on a stranger. Eight months pregnant at the time, she said one reason to go forward was that she wanted the couple’s child to one day understand what his father did to help others.

Simple tasks treasured

More than a year after a surgery that took a team of more than 60 medical professionals, Sandness is finding a groove in everyday life while still treasuring the simple tasks he lost for 10 years, such as chewing a piece of pizza.

He’s been promoted in his work as an oilfield electrician and is expanding his world while still prizing the anonymity that comes with a normal face.

“I wouldn’t go out in public. I hated going into bigger cities,” he said. “And now I’m just really spreading my wings and doing the things I missed out on — going out to restaurants and eating, going dancing.”

Life with a transplanted face takes work, every day. Sandness is on a daily regimen of anti-rejection medication. He’s constantly working to retrain his nerves to operate in sync with his new face, giving himself facial massages and striving to improve his speech by running through the alphabet while driving or showering.

“I wanted to show you that your gift will not be wasted,” Sandness told Ross.

​Like family now

Mardini and the rest of Sandness’ medical team have delighted in seeing their patient and friend open up since the procedure, going out of his way to talk with strangers whose gaze he once hid from.

“It turns out Andy is not as much of an introvert as we thought,” Mardini said. “He’s enjoying these times, where he’s missed out on 10 years of his life.”

Ross and Sandness say they feel like family now. They plan to forge a stronger connection, and Sandness said he’ll contribute to a trust fund for Leonard’s education.

On the day of their meeting, the boy stared curiously at Sandness at first. But later, he walked over and waved to be picked up. Sandness happily obliged.

For Ross, just meeting Sandness felt like a huge release, a way to get past a year filled with grieving, funeral planning, childbirth and gut-wrenching decisions about organ donations.

“Meeting Andy, it has finally given me closure,” she said, her voice choking as it trailed off. “Everything happened so fast.”
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