Spacewalking astronauts made urgent repairs at the International Space Station on Tuesday, three days after a critical relay box abruptly failed.

The 250-mile-high (400-kilometer-high) replacement job fell to commander Peggy Whitson, the world’s most experienced female astronaut. She now ties the record for most spacewalks by an American – 10.

Even though a second relay box managed the data load just fine after Saturday’s breakdown, NASA scrambled to put together a spacewalk in order to restore backup capability. The system is vital for operating the station’s solar panels, radiators and robotic equipment.

The failed data-relay unit – recently refurbished with upgraded software – was just installed in March. Hauling out a spare, Whitson photographed the faulty device to help engineers figure out what went wrong. Then she quickly removed it and bolted down the spare, an identical 50-pound (22-kilogram) box measuring 14 by 8 by 13 inches (35-20-33 centimeters) – officially known as an MDM or multiplexer-demultiplexer. But when Whitson discovered some metal flecks on some of the bolt holes, she had to pull the spare box back out.

Whitson and Fischer were just out spacewalking on May 12. That excursion was cut short by leaking station equipment, leaving two antenna installations undone. So Fischer completed the chore Tuesday.

Altogether, Tuesday’s spacewalk was expected to last no more than a few hours – exceedingly short by NASA standards.

“Here we go again,” French astronaut Thomas Pesquet said via Twitter as his U.S. colleagues suited up for the spacewalk. As they ventured outside, Pesquet cautioned, “You guys be safe.”

It was only the second spacewalk for Fischer, a rookie astronaut who arrived at the orbiting lab last month.

“What’s more awesome than being on @Space-Station? Getting a call from mission control 4 another spacewalk! Dancing w/ the cosmos,” he said in a tweet.

After he had installed the antennas, Fischer radioed, “Oh my gosh, it’s so beautiful,” as the station sailed out over the tip of South America and over the South Atlantic.

Whitson is more than halfway through a 9 ½-month mission. Currently on her third spaceflight, she’s spent more time off the planet than any other American and, at age 57, is the oldest woman to ever fly in space. Tuesday’s excursion put her in third place on the all-time spacewalking list, behind a Russian and fellow American with more hours out in the vacuum.

The space station also is home to two Russians.

 
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The positive impact of exercise is old news. There really is no downside, mentally or physically, to getting up and moving around in any form from taking walks to lifting weights. But what if a pill could give you all those benefits. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Margaret Chan, the outgoing Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), has opened this year’s World Health Assembly (WHA) by staunchly defending the organization against critics who say it has lost its relevance.  

Chan’s tenure as head of WHO will soon end and after 10 years of service, she appears intent on handing her successor, who will be elected Tuesday, an organization that is viable and remains the essential leader in global health.  

In addressing the WHA for the last time, Chan presented 3,500 delegates from WHO’s 194 member states with, what could be seen, as a report card of her work by presenting some highlights from a report issued this month tracking the evolution of public health during her 10-year administration.

“The report sets out the facts and assesses the trends, but makes no effort to promote my administration.  The report goes some way towards dispelling criticism that WHO has lost its relevance.  The facts tell a different story,” Chan said.

Drug costs

The report covers setbacks as well as successes and some landmark events.  Among the successes, she cited WHO’s decade-long fight “to get the prices for antiretroviral treatments for HIV down.”

In contrast, she said “prices for the new drugs that cure hepatitis-C plummeted within two years.”

The results in both cases have been dramatic in making life-saving drugs affordable for millions of people.  During the past 10 years, antiretroviral treatments have fallen from $10,000 to less than $100 a year and Hepatitis C drugs, which cost a prohibitive $80,000 just two years ago can now be had for less than $200.

Chan noted for most of her tenure she has been faced with shrinking health budgets resulting from the 2008 global financial crisis.

Despite the austerity measures forced upon the organization, she said WHO has made significant progress in many areas.  These include the elimination or reduction of neglected tropical diseases, bringing mental health out of the shadows and into the spotlight, and bringing polio and guinea worm closer to eradication.

Ebola epidemic

Along with these successes, Chan accepted responsibility for mistakes and bad decisions, including the WHO failure to recognize the magnitude of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.  

She acknowledged the devastating consequences of this lapse for the people of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, 11,315 of whom died from the deadly Ebola virus before the epidemic was declared in January 2016.

“But, WHO made quick course corrections,” said Chan, “and brought the three outbreaks under control through team work and partnerships and gave the world its first Ebola vaccine that confers substantial protection.

“This happened on my watch, and I am personally accountable,” she said.

New leader competition

The World Health Assembly, which runs through May 31, has an exceptionally heavy and important agenda, with the election of a new Director-General topping the list.

On Tuesday, delegates will choose the new head by secret ballot.  The three nominees include the first African candidate Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of Ethiopia; David Nabarro of Britain, and Sanja Nishtar of Pakistan.  

This is the first time that there has been more than one candidate.  Whoever wins this fiercely contested post will take office on July 1.

During the coming nine days, delegates will approve WHO’s program budget for 2018-19, which has risen to $4.7 billion.  The Assembly also will discuss a wide-range of health-related issues, including polio eradication, antimicrobial resistance, access to medicines and vaccines, health emergencies and the health of refugees and migrants.

This forum offers an opportunity for health ministers and other officials to present their views.  

Newly appointed U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price took the floor Monday to express the Trump Administration’s commitment to work with the new director general “on an agenda for ongoing improvements” including changes to ensure “a rapid and focused response to potential global health crises.”

Price stressed the need for reform and said Washington expected the next director-general “to prioritize threats to global health, including influenza.”

He said “we will work to enable all countries around the world to prevent, detect, respond to, mitigate, and control these outbreaks.”

Looking ahead

In closing her remarks to the WHA, Margaret Chan urged governments to maintain investments in health development, which, she said “brings dramatic results, also as a poverty reduction strategy.”

She said behind every number and every statistic is a person “who defines our common humanity and deserves our compassion, especially when suffering or premature death can be prevented.”

Judging from the thunderous applause at the end of her speech, the delegates appeared to have given Margaret Chan a good report card for her work during the past 10 years.
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Children younger than one should drink breast milk or formula, and should only drink fruit juice if advised by a doctor, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. The organization made the recommendation in the journal Pediatrics amid concerns about rising childhood obesity and tooth decay.

This is the first time since 2001 that the doctors’ group has reviewed its recommendation on fruit juice, which is a leading source of dietary sugar.

Between the ages of one and four, young children should consume no more than 118 milliliters of fruit juice, the doctors’ group says. The academy recommends that children between the ages of four and six restrict their juice intake to no more than 177 milliliters a day, while children between seven and 18 should limit their fruit juice consumption to 236 milliliters.

The new guidelines recognize that 100 percent natural and reconstituted juice can be a healthy part of a child’s diet. However, the group said juice should count for no more than one of the two to two-and-a-half recommended servings of fruit per day.

If fruit juice is given to young children, the academy discourages parents from putting it in a bottle or “sippy” cup, which may be in a child’s mouth all day, promoting cavities. Instead, it’s recommended that the juice be consumed all at once in a cup.

The group had previously recommended that parents wait until a child is six months old before introducing fruit juice to the diet. However, in light of the growing rates of obesity and other negative health effects, the American Academy of Pediatrics revisited the recommendation.

Juice is a frequent beverage of choice among U.S. teenagers and children, who experts say would rather drink it than water.

Dr. Steven A. Abrams, chairman of the Department of Pediatrics at the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas, and co-author of the policy statement, said there was nothing “magical” about the academy’s revised recommendation. 

Dell said the group simply saw no need or beneficial role for juice in very young children.
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Gender confirmation surgeries jumped by 20 percent in the United States from 2015 to 2016, according to a new survey.

The American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) survey says there were more than 3,200 “transfeminine” and “transmasculine” surgeries in 2016. Included in this number is everything from body contouring to full gender reassignment.

“There is no one-size-fits-all approach to gender confirmation,” said Loren Schechter, MD, a board-certified plastic surgeon based in Chicago. “There’s a wide spectrum of surgeries that someone may choose to treat gender dysphoria, which is a disconnect between how an individual feels and what that person’s anatomic characteristics are.”

The survey is the first ever done by the ASPS and includes data from 2015 to 2016.

One driver is that insurance companies are increasingly covering some of the procedures, making them more accessible and affordable.

“In the past several years, the number of transgender patients I’ve seen has grown exponentially,” said Schechter. “Access to care has allowed more people to explore their options, and more doctors understand the needs of transgender patients.”

Changing attitude is also behind the increase.

‘It’s only in the last couple of years that we’ve seen this dramatic increase in demand for procedures, it’s certainly a subject that’s more talked about,’ Schechter told Daily Mail Online.

Schechter added that until recently, there were just six U.S. surgeons who were certified to do both male-to-female and female-to-male genital surgery.

“The numbers are increasing, but one of the barriers is that there’s been no formal training program,” he told the Daily Mail.

For those undergoing sex change procedure, surgery is usually just a part of the process.

“Surgical therapy is one component of the overall care of the individual,” said Schechter. “It takes a team of experts across different disciplines working together to provide comprehensive care. I often partner with doctors who may prescribe treatments such as hormone therapy and mental health professionals who help patients through their transitions.”
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Ethiopia is battling an outbreak of acute watery diarrhea (AWD) that has affected more than 32,000 people.  At the same time, Ethiopia’s former minister of health, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, is a candidate to lead the World Health Organization.

 

The two facts are linked in that critics of Tedros say he has tried to minimize the outbreak by refusing to classify it as cholera, a label that could harm Ethiopia’s economic growth.

The WHO’s 194 member states will gather in Geneva for a 10-day assembly starting Monday. One of their first tasks is to choose the organization’s next director-general.

Tedros is one of three top contenders for the position, along with candidates from Britain and Pakistan.

Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, told The New York Times that Ethiopia has a long history of downplaying cholera outbreaks, and the WHO could “lose its legitimacy” if Tedros, who is also a former Ethiopian minister of foreign affairs, takes over the leadership of the organization.

“Dr. Tedros is a compassionate and highly competent public health official,” he told the Times. “But he had a duty to speak truth to power and to honestly identify and report verified cholera outbreaks over an extended period.”

But others have risen to Tedros’ defense. Tom Frieden, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the controversy over naming the outbreak is overblown. “During the time that Tedros was health minister, it would have not made any difference,” Frieden told VOA.

Cholera vs. acute watery diarrhea

Ethiopia has been accused of covering up three cholera outbreaks during Tedros’ tenure as health minister.

Declaring cholera would not have changed Ethiopia’s response to past AWD outbreaks, according to Frieden.  In fact, he says, avoiding the cholera label has not been irresponsible but rather a necessary compromise.

“It allowed public health to respond rapidly,” Frieden said.

The literature on AWD and cholera shows that treatment is the same. It calls for hydrating the patient, chlorinating water and improving sanitation. In fact, the WHO uses the terms interchangeably in their teaching materials on how to deal with an outbreak.

Lately, the development of cholera vaccines has brought the value of identifying the bacterial disease to the fore, said Frieden. “At this time, all African countries that report acute watery diarrhea should be rapidly doing lab confirmation and, if it’s cholera, considering the use of cholera vaccine in the response,” he said.

 

In the current outbreak, Ethiopia’s Somali region has been hit the hardest, with 768 deaths since January, according to a WHO report published May 12.  Almost 99 percent of the deaths and 91 percent of cases are in the same region.

The WHO representative to Ethiopia, Dr. Akpaka Kalu, says the government is right to call it AWD because regional health centers do not have the capacity to test every case.

If all cases are treated as cholera, the disease has the potential to spread more quickly when children who do not have it are brought into cholera treatment centers, Kalu said.

“We know, biologically, malnutrition causes diarrhea. Now, if you admit that child into a cholera treatment center, you’ve actually turned that center into a cholera transmission center,” he said, speaking by phone from Addis Ababa.

Current response

Over the past six weeks, the response to AWD in Ethiopia appears to have been effective.

Kalu said his team, along with regional leadership and government officials, have focused on prevention and intervention. They have instituted community-based surveillance to monitor the regional drought in general and AWD in particular, and there has been a drop in reported cases.

“We have evidence the average number of cases [dropped] from over 600 a day to about 54 a day,” he said.

Kalu argues that early interventions are getting results and doesn’t think that vaccinating 6 million people in the Somali region is feasible.

He says Ethiopia is now preparing to prevent outbreaks from spreading to other parts of the country such as the Afar and Amhara regions as the rainy season approaches.

“We need to enhance preparedness because, as the rains come, usually what happens is the rains wash and enter the water bodies including where there is open defecation,” he said. “That’s how water bodies get contaminated and people use the water and become sick. So there is a need, our focus is to build capacity to be able to detect and contain so that it doesn’t spread.”
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Minutes matter when it comes to treating sepsis, the killer condition that most Americans probably have never heard of, and new research shows it’s time they learn.

 

Sepsis is the body’s out-of-control reaction to an infection. By the time patients realize they’re in trouble, their organs could be shutting down.

 

New York became the first state to require that hospitals follow aggressive steps when they suspect sepsis is brewing. Researchers examined patients treated there in the past two years and reported Sunday that faster care really is better.

 

Every additional hour it takes to give antibiotics and perform other key steps increases the odds of death by 4 percent, according to the study reported at an American Thoracic Society meeting and in the New England Journal of Medicine.

 

That’s not just news for doctors or for other states considering similar rules. Patients also have to reach the hospital in time.

 

“Know when to ask for help,” said Dr. Christopher Seymour, a critical care specialist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine who led the study. “If they’re not aware of sepsis or know they need help, we can’t save lives.”

 

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last year began a major campaign to teach people that while sepsis starts with vague symptoms, it’s a medical emergency.

 

To make sure the doctor doesn’t overlook the possibility, “Ask, ‘Could this be sepsis?'” advised the CDC’s Dr. Lauren Epstein.

 

Sepsis is more than an infection

 

Once misleadingly called blood poisoning or a bloodstream infection, sepsis occurs when the body goes into overdrive while fighting an infection, injuring its own tissue. The cascade of inflammation and other damage can lead to shock, amputations, organ failure or death.

 

It strikes more than 1.5 million people in the United States a year and kills more than 250,000.

 

Even a minor infection can be the trigger. A recent CDC study found nearly 80 percent of sepsis cases began outside of the hospital, not in patients already hospitalized because they were super-sick or recovering from surgery.

 

There’s no single symptom

 

In addition to symptoms of infection, worrisome signs can include shivering, a fever or feeling very cold; clammy or sweaty skin; confusion or disorientation; a rapid heartbeat or pulse; confusion or disorientation; shortness of breath; or simply extreme pain or discomfort.

 

If you think you have an infection that’s getting worse, seek care immediately, Epstein said.

 

What’s the recommended care?

 

Doctors have long known that rapidly treating sepsis is important. But there’s been debate over how fast. New York mandated in 2013 that hospitals follow “protocols,” or checklists, of certain steps within three hours, including performing a blood test for infection, checking blood levels of a sepsis marker called lactate, and beginning antibiotics.

 

Do the steps make a difference? Seymour’s team examined records of nearly 50,000 patients treated at New York hospitals over two years. About 8 in 10 hospitals met the three-hour deadline; some got them done in about an hour. Having those three main steps performed faster was better — a finding that families could use in asking what care a loved one is receiving for suspected sepsis.

Who’s at risk?

 

Sepsis is most common among people 65 and older, babies, and people with chronic health problems.

 

But even healthy people can get sepsis, even from minor infections. New York’s rules, known as “Rory’s Regulations,” were enacted after the death of a healthy 12-year-old, Rory Staunton, whose sepsis stemmed from an infected scrape and was initially dismissed by one hospital as a virus.

 

What’s next?

 

Illinois last year enacted a similar sepsis mandate. Hospitals in other states, including Ohio and Wisconsin, have formed sepsis care collaborations. Nationally, hospitals are supposed to report to Medicare certain sepsis care steps. In New York, Rory’s parents set up a foundation to push for standard sepsis care in all states.

 

“Every family or loved one who goes into a hospital, no matter what state, needs to know it’s not the luck of the draw” whether they’ll receive evidence-based care, said Rory’s father, Ciaran Staunton.

 
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The World Health Organization’s regional chief for Africa reports prospects for rapidly controlling the spread of the deadly Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo are good.

While not underestimating the difficulties that lie ahead in bringing this latest outbreak of Ebola to an end, Matshidiso Moeti told VOA she is “very encouraged” by the speed with which the government and its national and international partners have responded to this crisis.

“I am quite optimistic because this is a government that is experienced at this, and which has got off to a very quick start and we are already on the ground with the partners.  

“We are getting logistic support from WFP (World Food Program) and from the U.N. mission.  So, I am quite optimistic,” Moeti said.

WHO has reported 29 suspected cases, including three deaths since Ebola was discovered in a remote region of DRC on April 22.   This deadly virus causes fever, bleeding, vomiting and diarrhea.  It spreads easily through bodily fluids and can kill more than 50 percent of its victims.

This is the eighth recorded outbreak of Ebola in DRC since 1976.  The outbreak was first detected in Bas-Uele Province, a densely-forested area in northeastern Congo near the border with the Central African Republic.

Outbreak isolated

Moeti calls the remoteness of the area “a mixed blessing.”

She said that there was little likelihood of a “rapid expansion of the outbreak to other localities due to population movement as happened in West Africa.  Although, we are keeping a close eye on the Central African Republic … where we are concerned that there is insecurity there.”

She said it was difficult to operate and carry out surveillance or investigations in this area because the road network leading there was not very well developed and “we have to drive long distances, not in a car, but have to use a motorbike.”

To remedy this, she said the government had fixed up a landing strip to enable helicopters to fly in the experts and material needed to deal with this crisis.

Moeti, a South African physician, replaced Luis Gomez Sambo of Angola as WHO regional head for Africa in January 2015 after he was criticized for his lackluster leadership in handling the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.  

The World Health Organization has come under scathing criticism by the international community for its slow and inept response to that unprecedented epidemic.  By the time WHO declared the Ebola epidemic at an end in January 2016, the deadly virus had killed 11,315 people in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea.

Experience put to use

During a recent visit to Kinshasa, Matshidiso Moeti said she saw how the hard lessons that have been learned from this tragic experience were being applied in DRC.

“What I observed was that the government itself was very quick in getting out to this remote area from the central level.  

“So, they sent a team from Kinshasa within a day or two of getting this alert to go and investigate and from the provincial level very rapidly, the government got down into this local area,” she said.

Moeti is leading a reform process to transform the WHO in the African Region into what she called a “more responsive, accountable, effective and transparent organization.”

She told VOA that this process was a component of WHO’s global reform effort and she would be rolling out the plan during a side-event on May 22, the opening day of this year’s World Health Assembly.

She said the reform program focused largely on how to improve measures for more quickly and efficiently tackling emergencies and communicable diseases.

“Clearly, as we saw very starkly with the Ebola outbreak, an outbreak can quickly transform into a big humanitarian crisis with all sorts of impacts.”

While the job of health reform is far from complete, Moeti said, “I am really pleased to say that we are starting to see how those changes that we have made are making a difference in how we operate.”

 

 
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A giant rhinoceros the size of three African elephants once grazed on treetops in Tibet, but succumbed to climate change more than 20 million years ago.

The high treetops disappeared, along with its food source, says Xiaoming Wang of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Wang has done field research on the long-legged rhino, more formally called the Indricotherium, one of the stars of a new exhibit that shows how radical adaptations that aid survival in one setting can spell disaster in another.

Through fossils and reconstructions, the exhibit tells the story of Mother Nature’s radical gambits to keep organisms alive in changing conditions. The show was built around an earlier exhibit from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which also included ice age remains from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles.

Mammals that have adapted in the extreme include an ancient whale that walked on land and more recent pygmy mammoths on California’s Channel Islands, whose small size is illustrated with side-by-side jaw bones of a Columbian mammoth and its pygmy relative, which shrunk to cope with limited food resources on the islands.

Many species challenged

Climatic variations over the ages and the more recent incursion of humans have challenged many species, said Emily Lindsey of the La Brea Tar Pits, a site rich with fossils from the mammoths and giant cats that once roamed California, but died out more than 10,000 years ago.

Seen in the exhibit are the extinct American lion, “which along with the cave lion in Europe was the biggest cat that ever lived,” Lindsey said.

There are fossils from a scimitar cat, also extinct, and a long-gone subspecies of jaguar.

“And then we have the mountain lion, which is the only one of those five big cats that’s still alive today,” she notes.

Also known as the cougar, panther or puma, the species is represented with a photo of a celebrated cat that continues to roam through the hills above Los Angeles.

“People thought he would just spend a couple of days there, then continue to move on or attempt to move on,” said Miguel Ordenana, who coordinates the amateur citizens scientists who make wildlife observations to help scientists better understand the region. Mountain lions, he said, typically do not survive crossing busy freeways, but this intrepid mountain lion is a survivor, as is his species.

Arctic island was once like Florida

Other mammals in the exhibit include the Batodonoides, a long-extinct shrewlike mammal from 50 million years ago so tiny that it could have perched on a pencil. The South American Macrauchenia, with a camellike body and giraffelike neck, had a flexible trunk, like an elephant. It went extinct a mere 10,000 years ago, but is represented here in a reconstruction.

Earth’s extreme changes can be seen in a diorama of Ellesmere Island in the Arctic.

Just 1,000 kilometers from the North Pole, it was home to warm swamps 50 million years ago and a host of animals adapted to a Floridalike climate.

Those intense changes served many species well, but presented extreme problems. Especially as environmental conditions caused the Arctic freeze over, leaving Ellesmere Island one of the coldest and driest locations on Earth.

An earlier version of this report had Xiaoming Wang’s name misspelled. VOA regrets the error.
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The challenges of adaptation and survival are the themes of a new exhibit at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles. Mike O’Sullivan reports that the the exhibit, Extreme Mammals, shows the radical changes in animal species over millions of years and the extinctions of species that failed to adapt.
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Recent studies suggest that as many as 400 million people around the world do not have access to basic health care. In some cases it’s because of conflict, but in some cases it’s just geography: humans live in some very far away places, Siberia for instance. That’s where the medical ship comes in handy. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Recent studies suggest that as many as 400 million people around the world do not have access to basic health care. In some cases it’s because of conflict, but in some cases it’s just geography: humans live in some very far away places, Siberia for instance. That’s where the medical ship comes in handy. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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Health ministers of the G20 leading economies, meeting for the first time Saturday, agreed to work together to tackle issues such as a growing resistance to antibiotics and to start implementing national action plans by the end of 2018.

Germany, which holds the G20 presidency this year, said it was an “important breakthrough” that all nations had agreed to address the problem and work toward obligatory prescriptions for antibiotics.

Pandemics

Saying that globalization caused infectious diseases to spread more quickly than previously, the 20 nations also pledged to strengthen health systems and improve their ability to react to pandemics and other health risks.

“By putting global health on the agenda of the G20 we affirm our role in strengthening the political support for existing initiatives and working to address the economic aspects of global health issues,” the communique said.

The results of the meeting will feed into a G20 leaders’ summit in Hamburg in July.

Overprescription

While the discovery of antibiotics has provided cures for many bacterial infections that had previously been lethal, overprescription has led to the evolution of resistance strains of many bacteria.

An EU report last year found that newly resistant strains of bacteria were responsible for more than 25,000 deaths a year in the 28-member bloc alone.

Germany has argued that even having a discussion about it will help raise public awareness about the problem. The G20 also said they agreed to help improve access to affordable medicine in poorer countries.

 
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A warmer, wetter climate is helping push dozens of Eastern U.S. trees to the north and, surprisingly, west, a new study finds.

The eastern white pine is going west, more than 80 miles (130 kilometers) since the early 1980s. The eastern cottonwood has been heading 77 miles north (124 kilometers), according to the research based on about three decades of forest data.

The northward shift to get to cooler weather was expected, but lead author Songlin Fei of Purdue University and several outside experts were surprised by the move to the west, which was larger and in a majority of the species.

New trees tend to sprout farther north and west while the trees that are farther south and east tend to die off, shifting the geographic center of where trees live. 

86 tree species

Detailed observations of 86 tree species showed, in general, the concentrations of eastern U.S. tree species have shifted more than 25 miles west (45 kilometers) and 20 miles (33 kilometers) north, the researchers reported in the journal Science Advances Wednesday.

One of the more striking examples is the scarlet oak, which in nearly three decades has moved more than 127 miles (205 kilometers) to the northwest from the Appalachians, he said. Now it’s reduced in the Southeast and more popular in the Midwest.

“This analysis provides solid evidence that changes are occurring,” former U.S. Forest Chief Michael Dombeck said in an email. “It’s critical that we not ignore what analyses like these and what science is telling us about what is happening in nature.”

Dryer South, wetter West

The westward movement helped point to climate change, especially wetter weather, as the biggest of many culprits behind the shift, Fei said. The researchers did factor in people cutting down trees and changes to what trees are planted and where, he said.

With the Southeast generally drying and the West getting wetter, that explanation makes some sense, but not completely, said Brent Sohngen at Ohio State University, who was not involved in the study.

“There is no doubt some signature of climate change,” he said in an email. But given the rapid rates of change reported, harvesting, forest fires and other disturbances, are probably still playing a more significant role than climate change, he wrote.
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Norway is repairing the entrance of a “doomsday” seed vault on an Arctic island after an unexpected thaw of permafrost let water into a building meant as a deep freeze to safeguard the world’s food supplies.

The water, limited to the 15-meter (50-foot) entrance hall in the melt late last year, had no impact on millions of seeds of crops including rice, maize, potatoes and wheat that are stored more than 110 meters inside the mountainside.

Still, water was an unexpected problem for the vault on the Svalbard archipelago, about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) from the North Pole. It seeks to safeguard seeds from cataclysms such as nuclear war or disease in natural permafrost.

“Svalbard Global Seed Vault is facing technical improvements in connection with water intrusion,” Norwegian state construction group Statsbygg, which built the vault that opened in 2008, said in a statement on Saturday. “The seeds in the seed vault have never been threatened.”

Spokeswoman Hege Njaa Aschim said Statsbygg had removed electrical equipment from the entrance — a source of heat — and was building waterproof walls inside and ditches outside to channel away any water.

The number of visitors would be reduced to limit human body heat, she said. Some of the water that flowed in re-froze and had to be chipped out by workers from the local fire service.

An underlying problem was that permafrost around the entrance of the vault, which had thawed from the heat of construction a decade ago, has not re-frozen as predicted by scientists, Aschim said.

Temperatures in the Arctic region have been rising at twice the global average in a quickening trend that climate scientists blame on man-made greenhouse gases. Svalbard has sometimes had rain even in the depths of winter when the sun does not rise.

“There’s no doubt that the permafrost will remain in the mountainside where the seeds are,” said Marie Haga, head of the Bonn-based Crop Trust that works with Norway to run the vault. “But we had not expected it to melt around the tunnel.”

Haga said the trust had so far raised just over $200 million toward an $850 million endowment fund to help safeguard seeds in collections around the globe. “That is an extremely cheap insurance policy for the world,” she said.
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One of the coldest areas in the world is getting greener, and researchers say it’s because of global warming.

Researchers from the University of Exeter in England who first studied the increase of moss and microbes in the Antarctic Peninsula in 2013, now say the greening of the region is widespread.

“This gives us a much clearer idea of the scale over which these changes are occurring,” says lead author Matthew Amesbury of the University of Exeter.

“Previously, we had only identified such a response in a single location at the far south of the Antarctic Peninsula, but now we know that moss banks are responding to recent climate change across the whole of the Peninsula.”

The peninsula, researchers say, is one of the more rapidly warming area in the world, adding that temperatures have risen by about a half-degree Celsius each decade since the 1950s.

For their study, researchers looked at five more core samples from three areas of moss banks over 150 years old. The new samples included three Antarctic Islands off the peninsula.

The cores, researchers say, showed “increased biological activity” over the past 50 years as the peninsula warmed. Researchers say their findings show “fundamental and widespread change,” and that the change was “striking.”

The changes are likely to continue.

“Temperature increases over roughly the past half-century on the Antarctic Peninsula have had a dramatic effect on moss banks growing in the region, with rapid increases in growth rates and microbial activity,” says Dan Charman, who led the research. “If this continues, and with increasing amounts of ice-free land from continued glacier retreat, the Antarctic Peninsula will be a much greener place in the future.”

The next step for researchers is to look back even further in history to see how climate change affected the region before humans made an impact.

The findings appeared in Current Biology on May 18.
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Mozambique has declared an end to a cholera epidemic that was triggered by heavy rains and infected more than 2,000 people, a senior government official said Friday.

The outbreak was another setback for Mozambique, which is grappling with a financial crisis as it strives to woo investors to develop huge offshore gas reserves.

“The epidemic is under control: In the last 28 to 29 days, we have not registered new cases of cholera and so we are declaring the epidemic terminated,” Francisco Mbofana, national director of public health, told a news conference.

Five cholera treatment centers installed in the most affected provinces have already been dismantled, Mbofana said.

Four people died between Jan. 5 and April 22 out of the 2,131 cases registered by health authorities. Last year, in the same period, 103 people died of cholera across the country.

Cholera causes severe vomiting and diarrhea and is often lethal if not treated swiftly.
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Yemen could see as many as 250,000 new cases of cholera within six months, in addition to 50,000 already reported, the World Health Organization said Friday.

“The speed of the resurgence of this cholera epidemic is unprecedented,” Nevio Zagaria, WHO country representative for Yemen, told reporters during a conference call on Friday.

He said the death toll from the outbreak has already reached 240 and more than 50,000 cases have been registered in the past three weeks.

Two years into a war between Houthi rebels and government forces allied with a Saudi-led Arab military coalition, which has killed more than 8,000 people, Yemen has declared a state of emergency Sunday in the capital, Sana’a, over the outbreak.

Fighting has taken a toll on medical facilities in the war-torn country, as more than half of Yemen’s facilities, which are now operated by Houthi rebels, no longer function.

The U.N. says some 17 million of Yemen’s 26 million people lack sufficient food and at least three million malnourished children are in “grave peril.”

Yemen, which is the Arab world’s poorest nation, is now classified by the World Health Organization as a level three emergency, alongside Syria, South Sudan, Nigeria and Iraq. This is the country’s second cholera outbreak in less than a year.

Cholera is highly contagious and can be contracted from ingesting contaminated food and water.
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The World Health Organization has delivered dramatic news about the causes of death for young people the world over. Governments and health agencies have made great strides in reducing deaths of young children through immunization and programs that address maternal and infant care. But adolescents have somehow fallen through the cracks.

Dr. Anthony Costello, director of WHO’s Department of Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health told VOA, “We’re finding 1.2 million (adolescents) die each year. That’s 3,000 deaths a day. That’s 10 jumbo jets.” What’s more, Costello says these deaths are largely preventable.

The study shows traffic injuries are the top cause of death among adolescents, those between 10 and 19. In most cases, the adolescent is struck by a car while walking or riding a bicycle.

Other leading causes of death include lower respiratory infections and suicide, the report found. The causes differ by gender, age and region. Boys between 15 and 19 years old are more likely to die from traffic injuries than girls or than younger boys. In sub-Saharan Africa, children are more likely to contract HIV.   

Girls between 10 and 14 are at risk for getting respiratory infections from indoor air pollution and from breathing in fumes from cooking fuels. Older girls, between 15 and 19, had a greater risk of death from pregnancy complications, childbirth or unsafe abortions. Teenage girls generally have small pelvises which lead to difficult labor.  

Costello said pregnant adolescent girls are also “more likely to get high blood pressure; they may be more vulnerable to bleeding, they may be more anemic. They may be in situations more vulnerable to malaria, to HIV.”  

The point of the study that was conducted by the WHO and partners at other U.N. agencies and the World Bank.

Looking forward

While the study focuses on the causes of death, Costello said the point was to help develop a framework and a plan to improve the health of adolescents. If adolescents had access to good health services, education and social support, fewer young people would die. In the case of traffic related deaths, he said better traffic laws, speed limits, the use of seatbelts could save lives in countries that don’t have strict driving safety laws. Costello pointed out that “In India, for example, there are 90,000 deaths on the road each year; many of those are adolescents and children.”

Dr. Flavia Bustreo, the assistant director-general at WHO, said, “Adolescents have been entirely absent from national health plans for decades.” The report proposes changing these plans and trying to help adolescents develop healthy lifestyle habits.

Costello said, “The roots of diabetes, of heart attacks, of strokes, of lung cancer, the root of that lies in the adolescent years, how the adolescents approach nutrition, and diet and exercise, whether they start to smoke or not, or abuse other substances.

Concept shift

Costello said countries need to create more adolescent friendly cities so adolescents have places to play, gather together safely and avoid gang violence.  

“Governments have got to invest in young people,” Costello said, because “they’re the future. We mustn’t be afraid to involve children in designing their own environments, in coming up with creative ideas, in working with peer groups, and investing in things that will give them an exciting life without exposing them to long term risks that could be avoidable.”

A study published in The Lancet in April shows that improving the physical, mental and sexual health of adolescents could result in significant economic returns. The study contends that an investment of about $4.60 per person per year would yield more than 10 times as much in benefits to society. This study was conducted by researchers from Victoria University and the University of Melbourne along with the United Nations Populations Fund.
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Commercial development of the globe’s huge reserves of a frozen fossil fuel known as “combustible ice” has moved closer to reality after Japan and China successfully extracted the material from the seafloor off their coastlines.

 

But experts said Friday that large-scale production remains many years away, and if not done properly could flood the atmosphere with climate-changing greenhouse gases. 

Frozen mix of water, gas

 

Combustible ice is a frozen mixture of water and concentrated natural gas. Technically known as methane hydrate, it can be lit on fire in its frozen state and is believed to comprise one of the world’s most abundant fossil fuels. 

 

The official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported that the fuel was successfully mined from beneath the South China Sea on Thursday. Chinese Minister of Land and Resources Jiang Daming declared the event a breakthrough moment heralding a potential “global energy revolution.” 

 

A drilling crew in Japan reported a similar successful operation two weeks earlier, on May 4 along the Shima Peninsula. 

For Japan, methane hydrate offers the chance to reduce its heavy reliance on imported fuels. In China, it could serve as a cleaner substitute for coal-burning power plants and steel factories that have polluted much of the country with lung-damaging smog.

Estimated reserves are large

 

Methane hydrate has been found beneath seafloors and buried inside Arctic permafrost and beneath Antarctic ice. 

 

Estimates of worldwide reserves range from 280 trillion cubic meters (10,000 trillion cubic feet) up to 2,800 trillion cubic meters (100,000 trillion cubic feet), according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. By comparison, total worldwide production of natural gas was 3.5 billion cubic meters (124 billion cubic feet) in 2015, the most recent year available.

 

That means methane hydrate reserves could meet global gas demands for 80 to 800 years at current consumption rates.

 

Yet efforts to successfully extract the fuel at a profit have eluded private and state-owned energy companies for decades. That’s in part because of the cost of extraction techniques, which involve large amounts of water and power to flood methane hydrate reserves so the fuel can be released and brought to the surface.

 

There are also environmental concerns, said David Sandalow, a former senior official with the U.S. State Department now at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

 

If methane hydrate leaks during the extraction process, it can increase greenhouse gas emissions. If it can be used without leaking, it has the potential to replace dirtier coal in the power sector.

 

“The climate implications of producing natural gas hydrates are complicated.There are potential benefits, but substantial risks,” Sandalow said.
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Scientists have discovered a possible cure for all five known Ebola viruses, one of which ravaged West Africa in recent years.

The so-called broadly neutralizing antibodies were discovered in the blood of a survivor of the West African epidemic, which ran from late 2013 to mid-2016. The deadly virus killed more than 11,000 people of the nearly 29,000 who became infected in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone.

Ebola got its name from the first documented outbreak, which occurred along the Ebola River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire, in 1976. Since then, there have been two dozen outbreaks of Ebola in Africa, including a current one that has infected nine people in the DRC. Three people have died.

Kartik Chandran, a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, New York, helped identify the antibodies, which were described online in the journal Cell. He is optimistic that the antibodies can be used as a single therapy to treat all Ebola viruses.

“Based on the nonhuman primate studies that are ongoing, and given the fact that they are pretty predictive, I would be optimistic that they could be used to protect people and reverse disease,” Chandran said.

350 antibodies isolated

Researchers isolated about 350 antibodies from the human blood sample, two of which showed promise in neutralizing three viruses in tissue culture. The antibodies work by interfering with a process that the pathogen uses to infect and multiply inside cells.

The drug company Mapp Pharmaceutical Inc. is now testing the antibodies in monkeys to make sure they are safe and effective.

A forerunner of the experimental drug, called Zmapp, was in the experimental stages when it was pressed into service during the last epidemic. Zmapp is a combination of cloned antibodies discovered in mice that enlist the body’s natural immune system to fight infection. If given up to five days after symptoms appear, it can cure the disease.

The problem, Chandran said, is Zmapp is not terribly specific and works to neutralize only Ebola Zaire, one of the five known viruses. He said the broadly neutralizing human antibodies attack and destroy all of the viruses.   

It took scientists just six months to discover the antibodies, according to Chandran, “so this is really incredibly fast and incredibly gratifying.  And we are hoping that things will continue at this pace and that in very short order we will be in a position to be able to test these things in people.”

While the broadly neutralizing antibodies are being developed as a treatment, Chandran envisions using them in a vaccine that can be given ahead of an Ebola outbreak to guard against infection.
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Heavy rain shaped the Martian landscape billions of years ago, according to a new study.

According to researchers at the Smithsonian Institution and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, rain on Mars once carved river beds and created valleys much like rain on Earth has, and does. It no longer rains on the Red Planet, and the water that remains is mostly in the form of ice.

The rain appears to have slowly changed over time, researchers said, noting that changes in the Martian atmosphere influenced how heavy the rain was, particularly the size of the raindrops.

When Mars formed 4.5 billion years ago, it had a much thicker atmosphere and higher atmospheric pressure. Pressure, researchers say, influences the size of raindrops.

They say that early in the planet’s history, the rain would have actually been more like fog, so it would unlikely have made much of an impact on the terrain. But as the atmosphere thinned over time, larger raindrops could form and were heavy enough to “cut into the soil” changing the shape of craters and leading to running water that could have carved valleys.

Specifically, researcher say the atmospheric pressure on the Red Planet was about four bars, compared to one bar on Earth today. This means the raindrops could not have been bigger than three millimeters across. Over time the pressure dropped to 1.5 bars allowing for larger drops measuring about 7.3 millimeters across.

“By using basic physical principles to understand the relationship between the atmosphere, raindrop size and rainfall intensity, we have shown that Mars would have seen some pretty big raindrops that would have been able to make more drastic changes to the surface than the earlier fog-like droplets,” said Ralph Lorenz of John Hopkins APL.
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Colon cancer patients who adopt a healthy lifestyle after treatment could potentially reduce their risk of death from a recurrence by more than 40 percent, according to new research.

The findings were released ahead of a conference of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the world’s largest organization of clinical cancer professionals.

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco analyzed data gathered in a prospective study of 1,000 advanced, stage III colon cancer patients from across the United States who were enrolled from 1999-2001. The volunteers, from 13 institutions, were evaluated over a period of seven years.

At two points during the trial, participants filled out a questionnaire asking whether their lifestyle following treatment matched prevention guidelines recommended by the American Cancer Society.

Body weight

The guidelines include maintaining a healthy body weight, eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, limiting consumption of red and processed meats, and engaging in regular physical activity.

Nine percent of patients in the study adhered to the guidelines. Of those, there was a reduction in death by 42 percent and a 31 percent lower risk of cancer recurrence compared to patients who did not follow the guidelines. In the study, colon cancer returned in 355 patients, 256 of whom died.

The federally-funded study was the first to look at colon cancer survivorship. Other studies have focused on cancer prevention through adoption of a healthy lifestyle.

There are a reported one million colon cancer survivors in the United States; the disease is the second-leading cause of cancer death. 

UCSF lead author Erin Van Blarigan said treated colon cancer patients are living longer than ever before, but there needs to be more emphasis on survivorship care. She called for an increase in resources to help more people adopt a healthy lifestyle in the aftermath of a diagnosis and treatment.

“There is a pressing need for improved survivorship care and resources to help people adopt and maintain a healthy lifestyle after cancer diagnosis,” Blarigan said.

Harvard University in Massachusetts administered the lifestyle questionnaire. The results were analyzed by researchers at the University of California.
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An ongoing measles outbreak in Minnesota has shined a light on the fact that many Somali immigrants choose not to vaccinate their children.   

According to the Minnesota Department of Health, 63 measles cases have been reported statewide as of May 16, and 53 of those cases were Minnesotans of Somali origin. Sixty of the reported cases involve individuals confirmed to not be vaccinated.

Public health officials blame false rumors that vaccines are linked to autism and other health problems for the high rate of unvaccinated children in Minnesota’s Somali-American community.  

The department’s disease director, Kris Ehresmann, said anti-vaccination groups have targeted the community with events and have even translated the anti-vaccine documentary “Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe” into Somali.

“They have been very aggressive and are continuing in their efforts to reach out to the community with misinformation throughout the duration of this outbreak,” Ehresmann said.

Anti-vaccine views

In interviews with Somali mothers, VOA’s Somali Service found that anti-vaccine views are widespread.

“I have a baby boy who was well before the vaccine, but eventually he became autistic because of the vaccine. After him, I have never vaccinated my children,” said Safia Sheikh Mohamed, a mother of four children.

Mohamed listed a number of problems she believes are associated with vaccines, including food allergies, ear infections and eczema, a treatable condition in which the skin becomes inflamed or irritated.

Another mother said she vaccinated her child, but did so later in life. “I never gave vaccines to my last born child before he turned 6, during his first year of school.”  

Community leaders reach out

Multiple large-scale studies have found there is no connection between autism and the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine, despite rumors to the contrary.

The Minnesota Department of Health is working hard to dispel such beliefs through outreach campaigns.  The department has a Somali staff member and a group of Somali health advisers who meet one-on-one with people and attend various community meetings.

“Our challenge at this point is really scalability,” Ehresmann said. “If we could multiply our efforts by 10-fold or more, that would be great, but obviously there are resource challenges.”

Ahmed Roble, a Somali-American physician who owns a clinic in Minnesota, said he and his colleagues try to dispel misinformation.

“As health professionals, our aim is not only to cure the patient but also to give them counseling,” he said. “That is what we do for the worrying mothers and fathers who are skeptical about MMR vaccination.”

Perhaps the best argument for vaccinating children is the current outbreak, which may be frightening parents into action. Prior to the outbreak, about 30 Somali children per week received the MMR vaccine in Minnesota, but, since the outbreak, that number has grown to 500 children per week.

“We know that as a result of the outbreak and perhaps as a result of seeing measles in real life there, that combined with other messaging has made an impact on a number of the parents,” Ehresmann said.

Additionally, parents are beginning to see the consequences of not vaccinating children. Children who are not vaccinated are forced to stay out of daycare for 21 days if a measles case is reported and could be forced to stay out indefinitely if multiple cases occur.

State Rep. Ilhan Omar, the first Somali-American elected to serve in a state legislature, invited parents, doctors, owners of clinics and community leaders to share their thoughts at a meeting on Wednesday. She called for parents who do not vaccinate their children to take responsibility.

“It will be the parents’ responsibility if they don’t want to vaccinate. They should go and discuss with doctors, and then, if they insist, it’s their responsibility.  It will be documented,” she said.

The state is bracing for an uptick in cases as the month of Ramadan approaches in late May and June and families gather for the celebration. The final celebration of Eid al-Fitr has the greatest potential for spreading the disease.

“It would represent the biggest risk for potential transmission,” said Ehresmann, because “it’s bringing together kids and adults and everybody, and it’s not just the population of a single mosque, it’s multiple mosques coming together.  That factor means that could have the potential for transmission.”

Reporter Steve Baragona contributed to this report.
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